


52 Weeks of Sam & Dean

by innerglow



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 52 series, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-05-26 12:53:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 42
Words: 35,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6240151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innerglow/pseuds/innerglow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a 2016 challenge between me (<a href="http://jerk-bitch.com">@buticancarryyou</a>) and <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/tofu_is_amazing">tofu_is_amazing</a> (<a href="http://whoaeasytiger.com">@whoaeasytiger</a>). </p><p>Every week we come up with a prompt that we both write about, trying to keep it under 1k.  We've donned this our 'Epic Writing Battle' and have had tons of fun thus far!  And we hope you have just as much fun reading them!  <3</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. If A Church Had Ribs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tofu_is_amazing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tofu_is_amazing/gifts).



> **Week #1 Prompt:** Sam + Church

Sam Winchester is a church like no other, the most beautiful one Dean’s ever stepped foot inside.   **  
**

Ivory ribs house the holy spirit of Dean’s only Faith, the only thing his unbending knees find themselves clamoring towards the floor for.  There’s a Church bell heart that rings at midnight and again in the morning, rings and rings and rings.  And Dean’s footfalls keep pace with the mighty ding and he closes his eyes and finds solace in its call.  A litany of ‘amens’ falling from his tongue in the silence of every beat.  

Ding. _Amen_. Dong. _Amen_. Ding. _Amen_. Dong. _Amen_.

Dean traces the pews at Sam’s throat, longs to fit his aching body there permanently.   He wants to be absolved of all sin, wants to bathe in the light that shines in Sam’s eyes, wants to fix himself in those stained glass windows.  He finds himself at the cross of Sam’s spine and hips, there he makes a confessional where he whispers the things he tells no other soul.   And it’s Sam’s tongue that tells him how many Hail Sammy’s he must chant for penance.  

The samulet is a rosary that Dean wraps around his calloused hands and presses to his lips, the one that was blessed by Sammy and worn as sign of Dean’s absolute Faith in Him, in Sam.  And the more Dean prays, the more the sprawling arches of Sam’s ribs sprout with flowers and clovers.  Dean takes it as a sign that he has been heard, that the darkness of his soul has been absolved and forgiven.  If only in the eyes of Sam.  

The holy water that is Sam’s kiss, is a balm that soothes Dean’s skin, making him anew–making him whole and clean and deserving all over again.   Sam, who curls around him and plants himself in Dean’s chest, where he promises to forever grow–beyond the hands of time.  And if Dean cries in his humility at Sam’s gentle and forgiving gaze, it’s not because he feels unworthy–but only because it is a love so encompassing and raw.   A love that knows no conditions, one that accepts and repairs even the darkest corners of Dean’s heart.

Maybe their life is a tragedy, maybe it had to be that way in order to carve out the broad marble of Sam’s shoulders, into something Holy and magnificent. Maybe he had to know darkness, in order to shine such light upon the world. Whatever the case, Dean Winchester’s grateful to know such Faith, such love. Knows that he’s the only one who can stand in the church of Sam and hear the bell of his heart sing just for him.  Knows he’s lucky just to stand in Sam’s light, to kneel before it and confess triumphantly that his soul is bound to Sam’s and only Sam’s–

–forever.


	2. Bad Boy Scars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #2 Prompt:** Scars

They curl into each other’s mouths, a wisp of smoke, tasting like razor blades against the throat. It’s a kiss, it’s a gut punch, it’s knuckles against the cheekbone–rattling one another to the core.  Their love is a prison, their souls, the ink tattoos they wear like bad boy scars.   **  
**

There’s a gnarled, barely healing gash on their hearts and it’s bleeding black and blue.  Tongues ache around the quivering mess and they try desperately to hide their broken teeth, their trembling fingers, because monsters cannot love.  But crooked smiles find themselves home in sharp collarbones, a wolf cry in the hips of twisted boys.  

They carve themselves down the backs of each other’s legs, carving each other’s initials in the caves at the backs of their knees.   And then bloodied fingers press greedily into the wounds and hungry stomachs beg for the pleas of each other’s death-song lungs.   

‘Say my name, say my name, say my name.’  ‘Scream it.’  ‘Choke on it.’  

They both egg the other cruelly on.   And it’s a tidal wave of need that vomits in their brains as these disaster-canvassed lovers, whine to paint the world (and each other) in the wrongness of their l-o-v-e.  

Twister boys, spinning out of control, wrap their hands around each other’s throats and they give a squeeze–the heart stopping kind.   And they look into the midnight windows of each other’s eyes and they see the mangled reflections of themselves.   Every misplaced puzzle piece of their skins, is of the other’s doing and they’re hideous in ways the world will never know.

Matching monster hearts, beat in a gnawing rhythm against their prison cell bones.  Their love is a haunted battle wound that they both wear proudly. They pin it like butterfly wings against the shadow of their matchstick hearts and when they touch, they burn their names out each other’s mouths.  And it sounds like a jailbird song against the bars of their jailhouse teeth.   A white picket fence that they sink into each other’s throats, a barbed wired cage built around that pulse point of a home that they both will faithfully ride or die for–

Because ‘I love you’ is a scar on their lips and when they fight, a busted lip reminds them what it tasted like to say it for the first time.  


	3. His Boy King

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #3 Prompt:** Boy King

_Boy King!,_ The chants start in the darkest depths and rattle every cage, every rack, every blade that is sung into the air and craving blood.  An endless sea of midnight eyes pin themselves against a golden flecked sun and tremble with the heat of his fiery glance.  For _He_ has come,  has ascended to the soul soaked throne and is here to rule them all.    **  
**

_Boy King!_ , The name precedes his ashen foot falls, lures him from his sleep and makes his beast heart howl into the night.  He walks upon the fallen souls who gave their lives, for him to be, a black carpet of blackened soot that coats his heels and dusts the path behind him.  There’s a golden rib cage of bones, teeth and blood that perches the top of his head.  And it squawks with its glory, breaks knees and forces the devotion of those who look upon it.  

 _Boy King!_ , It paints the halls in blood and in sacrifice, paints the crooked hands that reach for him, every single one of them longing to touch–to feel the violent grace that pulses beneath his skin.  But touching is not allowed, his marble skin and blood red lips are only meant to be worshipped, achingly idolized with the bloodhound tongues in their throats.  To touch him, means instant death–the snapping of bones and spatter of blood.  But so many dare to die with the glory of his perfection at their fingertips, so many are ready to sacrifice an eternity with his shadow, just to touch the torch of his soul.  

 _Boy King!_ , It’s a destiny for black rimmed eyes, for sunflowers sinking into the blackest waters.  It’s for the boy whose soul was so bright, it could only know the love of darkness.  His moon-like heart, sitting in the palace of his skeleton, begging to know the sun–to feel it’s warmth on his skin.  But his phoenix wings, made of fire, carried him into the night and fixed him against the darkest skies, letting him become the king of darkness–a sun in his own right.  

 _Boy King!,_ Billions of souls could scream it, but there’s only one that he hears.  It’s like static against the ears, his crooked heart tuning into one and only one soundwave.  And when he hears it, his skin comes alive, glittering with fire and specks of golden ash.  

 _My King._ , His Brother whispers, delicate and yet explicitly fierce.  The mirror of his soul, bends on one knee, bowing before him–waiting, always waiting.  He takes his Brother’s hand and presses his hungry lips to his Brother’s bloodied knuckles.  The echo of screams vibrate there, the ones of torture and disobedience, of the purest sacrifice, all at the hands of his beloved.  The one with dying stars for eyes and twisted bones that only fit with is own.  

And when he finally speaks, it’s to the only one worthy of his tongue–

_Welcome home, My Love_ **.**


	4. Dead Boy Bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #4 Prompt:** All Hell Breaks Loose

It’s dark when the ringing of ears sounds with your name, with your name, with your name.    It sounds like a confession, sounds like a dying man’s last wish, sounds like a nightmare fashioned out of a guttural scream.   Sounds like a love letter hanging like glass in the wind.  Every syllable, a shard that slices right through the tendons behind trembling knees.  Every struggled breath, a labor of love, of a heart stopping in the hands of the one who carried it for lifetimes–for infinities.   

An unholy mouth litters the night with a litany of crooked prayers.  Desperate wrists fix themselves into crosses against the dead boy bones, bloodied fingers clawing at the ribs–pleading with the night to not let the last star in the galaxy, die.  Because it’s dark in the dirt, it’s dark when sunlit eyes are black with death, it’s dark when the reason for color is bled dry all over tragedy calloused fingers.   

‘ _Oh god no_ ’ hands cling to dead boy bones, like some cling to photographs after hungry tornado monsters ate their home.   Because maybe if the pressure is just right, maybe if the fingernails are sharp enough, _‘oh god no’_ fingers can hammer dead boy bones back together again.  Maybe a corpse can become a home once more.   Maybe the sun will rise, maybe the stars will still shine.  Maybe the breath from two lungs, will become four again.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.  

But the hole in the ground is already a gaping grave, hungry for dead boy bones and ‘ _oh god no_ ’ tears.  A dirt pit fashioned out of arms, out of chests, out of hips that beg for mercy.  Please, please, please.  Because the gravity of two hearts, of one racing and one still, is enough to weigh two bodies down with the gruesome reality that paints itself vivid into the night.  Of a boy who took his first and last steps in the same direction.  And of another, who carried him away once, twice, always and forever.  The one who still carries him as he is–dead boy bones.  

It’s a clamoring of knees, of ‘ _oh god no_ ’ knuckles whiting around the ‘please bring him back’ box that is pressed into the dirt, a crossroad–a cemetery for the soul.  A pleading ground, for the hungry, for the desperate, for the needy. And when black eyes ask what they can have in return for dead boy bone’s breath, ‘oh god no’ hands pound at the chest, lips snarling around the words– _my soul_.  

Because what use is it, what good could it ever be…when half of it is a ghost? 


	5. An Eight-Letter Word for Heartbreak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #5 Prompt:** Stanford

It’s an eight letter word, but your ‘please don’t leave me’ mouth refuses to give them life.  As though if you swallow down every jagged consonant and vowel, you can make them disappear entirely.  But instead they rot in your stomach, they feast like maggots do a corpse.  And maybe that’s what it is, you think.  Maybe it’s because the meaning of that eight letter ‘atomic bomb’ of a word, is death in itself; an expiration date for your last breath.  Because, after all, your crooked feet don’t walk any other direction, but towards him.   **  
**

 _Only_ him.

And he looks at you, pins a thousand pleading origami suns into your chest and asks you to let go.  Asks you, like you’re the fucking midnight sky and he is the goddamned stars.  But it’s not that simple, you tell him.  How could it be that simple?  How do you make calloused hands forget the body they’ve carried all their life?  How do you make a home out of anything else but the ribs that surround his heart?  How does that sky exist without those stars?

Is it even a sky anymore?

It’s eight letters and it feels like a deathbed, one he asks you to crawl into and be okay with.  You want to argue, want to spit some choice four letter words back at him, but instead you give him the only four letters you can.  The only four letters that will keep you afloat in the abyss of night, without his milkyway smile.  You whisper it as you break your cement fingers away from his own, letting him go.  

And before he leaves, he whispers those four letters back.  He presses them to your ‘please don’t leave me’ mouth and leaves a promise in their wake.  

It tastes like– ‘I’ll come _home_ soon.’


	6. If I Had A Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #6 Prompt:** Serial Killers

They say the first cut is the deepest, and maybe it is, but their knives fight jab for jab to be just as deep–just as deliberate as the first.  Crooked spines, match broken smiles and the missing puzzle pieces of themselves, can be found inside a lifeless body.   **  
**

_If I had a heart, I could love you._  

But they’re heartless, both of them; they’ve got gaping black holes in their chests, empty shelves for ribs–where pounding hearts should shiver.  Bloodied lips, dressed with the pulsing beat of a stolen life, reach for each other.  They kiss above a corpse, their dicks half hard from the euphoria of a fresh kill.  Their tongues fight for the red on each other’s lips, the blackness of their souls, swallowing down the innocent taste of it.  They’re depraved.  And it’s sick; they’re sick.  Sick, sick, sick.  

_This will never end, cause I want more._

They cut themselves out another heart and take turns pressing it to each other’s ribs.   The press it to their ears, like a conch shell and try to listen for the pounding beat it used to know.   But all that hits their ears, is the heavy breath from each other’s lungs–a desperation to feel alive, to feel that foretold sound in their own chests.  Because if they had one, both of their hearts would beat in sync–two stomping beats, a warring drum.  But all is silent and the body is still warm, the heart doesn’t fit and their hunger returns–barely satisfied.  

_More, gimme more, gimme more…_

Two pairs of starving hips, ache with a different need and bloodied fingers shake with the explicit want to have and to take.  They paint each other with death, their bodies pressed together and smearing the spilled blood on the floor.  And then they’re fucking next to the wide eyed corpse, their wagging tongues and biting teeth leaving trails of relief in their wake.  They’re animalistic, their pelvis’ knocking rapidly as matching growls light up the room around them.  And when they come, one of them has their hand in the corpse’s hair and the other has their hand pressed into the hole in it’s chest.  

_If I had a heart, I could love you._

But until then, they’ll continue to carve out stolen one’s, naming them after they’re missing ones.


	7. Claiming of The Soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #7 Prompt:** kiss me where no one has kissed me before

These two bodies tangle, the grinding of ribs and teeth and hips–never ending. And a knife-like tongue, wakes–craving only the untouched, the unclaimed, the holiest of places for the scribbling pleas of a name.   A wicked desperation crawling up the spine, a heart aching to leave a part of their body behind in the other’s, a piece of them that will only warm with their touch–that will only sigh with their kiss.   **  
**

 _Is it here?_  Sunflowers ask the sky, lips to the throat.   _Or here?_  Peach-kisses against the navel.   _Here?_  A tongue flick against the ribs.   _Where is this sacred place no other has known, what is the achilles heel to your heart–to your moans–to your fantasies?_  A pirate-like lover sails the sea of ivory skin, one that is amber speckled and infinite.   _Where is the treasure chest?_  Fingers dig into hipbones.   _Where’s the ‘X’ that marks the spot, the place that will build cities in thy name?_  Butterfly kisses at the back of the knees, a drag of the nose up the back of the thighs, whispering fingertips along the spine.  

 _Where is the place that is meant only for these hands?_   _Only for these eyes? For this tongue, these lips, these sighs–this love?_  Starved lungs breath heavily with the weighted need to find the secret garden that was built explicitly for the ache in trembling ribs, the one that squeezes violently when it hears its name whispered out loud.    _Yes, say it louder, love._   S _ay it so loud, scream it like church bells into the hollows of this throat._   _Let your lily lips bloom against this mouth, let it expose the only place that this heart could call a home._  

Two hearts expose themselves raw, the armor of ribs and the ribbons of blood, pulled back and invisible.  Two quaking organs, beating and alive, sprouting from matching chests and touching for the first time.  And it is there that the garden blooms, that starved tongues may finally find the moon that they were destined to howl to.   It is there, in the dim light of the room that surrounds two souls, out of their bodies, making love for the first time.   

 _There it is._  Delicate, awestruck whispers.  Two bodies still on the hill of euphoria, eyes lit with ecstasy.   _How beautiful, how grand!_  A gentle caress of calloused fingers, thy name burning itself bold and true.  And it is claimed, and it is touched–only by these hands, by these eyes, these lips, these sighs–this love.    _I should have known._   A blush of the cheeks, sunflowers bowing to the sky.    _Forgive me, love.   Forgive this hungry beast of a heart and it’s pulse of greed._   

Two hands, clasped–a tether from one to the other, unbreakable.   Two souls forever marked by the initials of each other’s names.  Their sighs, the thrones that crimson lips sit upon and sing of ‘hallelujahs’.   

A press of the lips, the warming of light.  ‘X’ marks the spot.  For it is only thy soul that will wake with the heat of this kiss.


	8. Curling Smoke and Teenage Ribs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #8 Prompt:** Shotgunning

Sam’s teenage ribs find themselves feeling somewhere between ‘being too young’ and ‘just old enough’, because a monster called ‘Lust’ has crawled its way into his little boy dreams, breathing life to certain parts of his body that sing of wants he doesn’t know how to vocalize.   Like his arching hips, the stiffness behind the zipper on a pair of his hand-me-down jeans, as his eyes feast on the leather jacket prize in front of him.   And he wonders how two lips can make a cigarette look like heaven, like an asphyxiated death, like a bubblegum fantasy that’s come true–all wrapped into one.   His bloodhound eyes bark after pink budded lips, ones that curl and pull around a tobacco stick, his groin starved for the hollowed cheeks and his Brother’s ‘off limits’ mouth.   **  
**

_But, what if - what if - what if?_

As if on queue, big Brother lips smile around spiraling smoke and Dean’s eyes darken to a sinning shade, matching Sam’s.   Thick fingers wave Sam closer and his heart is stuttering, his heartbeat pulsing like a drum in his throat.   Because, this is just what he wants, what his growing spine has been reaching for–to be closer, so close that two bodies blur together.  And he moves his graveyard feet, every pace bringing him nearer to that gaping grave in Dean’s chest.  When he gets there, Sam prays his knobby knees will weather the storm of electric desire, his fingers sweating as they curl into fists, because the sweet paradise of heated freckled skin awaits him, a sky his tongue longs to hang wishes onto.  

 _I wish I may, I wish I may, I wish I may._  

There’s whispers, a coy laugh as forbidden lips wrap deliciously back around the butt of a menthol cigarette.   And before Sam can even fathom it, calloused fingers bury themselves into the curling hair at the base of his skull and they’re pulling him in and begging for his mouth to open up.   Dean’s wet sin of a mouth, folds over Sam’s lips and suddenly he’s drowning in ribbons of smoke and the explicit feel of those blushed and pink lips against his own.   

_Breath, Baby Boy.  Breathe, breathe._

The wolf in Sam’s chest, growls awake and crawls out of his mouth, attacking those precious deathbed lips before they can get away.   

_Bury me, bury me, bury me._

Dean nips and sucks all the blood into Sam’s bottom lip and it’s got Baby Boy Sam pulling back and choking out a broken, “Shit.”   Because yea, that’s good, yea that’s just want his teenage ribs have been craving for so long, the monster in his chest howling with the throbbing fullness between his legs.   And when Dean takes another drag of the cigarette, Sam waits open mouthed and pretty.  

 _Take me, take me, take me._  

With a mouthful of smoke, Sam falls to his knees, his fingers unbuckling Dean’s jeans and pulling them down.  He exposes the not-so-sweet need that Dean’s been hiding all these years and then he blows the smoke out, watches as it curls onto and around the beautiful and delicate skin waiting there.   And with Dean’s green moons glowing down at him, Sam opens his creaking coffin of a mouth and whispers–

“Who is the monster now?”


	9. Born To Die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #9 Prompt:** Ghosts

The world doesn’t look all that livable to Sam’s sunset pooled eyes, as they peek through the shaggy brown curtains of his teenage rebellion bangs. There’s nothing that a corpse covered in wilting skin, or a post mortem mouth, or a cold unbeating heart–that could convince him that his wheezing lungs could ever learn to love to breathe.  So he draws skulls on the knees of his jeans, draws black roses on his arms.  He holds his breath as long as he can, until the world gets fuzzy, until that ache in his chest starts to feel less like some cruel joke and something more like necessity.   **  
**

Until Dean Winchester melts from behind his eyes.

If there were a God, Sam would like to punch him in the stomach.  Would like to take his gun and thrust it down his throat.  Would like to wrap his bony fingers around that good for nothing, ‘holier-than-thou’, piece of shit and choke him into nonexistence–erase him from every page he was ever scribbled upon.  Because what kind of God would give him a heart like the one that beats blasphemy in his ribs?  Sam doesn’t know, but it’s definitely not one he chooses to believe in.  And even if he could believe in him, Sam doesn’t know if that type of Faith could even fit in his chest–not when it’s already on bended knee for someone else.

Sam doesn’t remember the precise moment he started to become infatuated with ghosts, doesn’t know when unzipping his body and being free of it’s confines sounded better than waking another day–but if he had to bet on it, he’d say it had something to do with when he realized he was in love with his big Brother.  Because in this world, their love is forbidden–it is cursed and spat upon.  Their lips could never touch, their fingers could never lace, their hearts could never be free to love each other–not in the bodies they’ve been imprisoned in.  

But maybe, Sam thinks–maybe if they were to become ghosts–they could spend the next infinity doing nothing but haunting one another.  Maybe, in some other plane, some other existence, their hands could touch–their lips could meet and the entire world wouldn’t shake in disgust because of it.  Perhaps, if being dead means being truly alive–Sam Winchester was never meant to be human in the first place.  

Sam spends every waking second, scratching his skin like a snake, trying to rid himself of the one thing that prevents him from reaching over and claiming Dean’s wild stallion-like lips with his own.   Instead he digs his fingernails into his thighs and he tries to work the lungs he’s spent so much of his life resenting.  He jots down another tally mark, one counting another excruciating day he had to live with a chest full of poison in his ribs.   

And then he catches Dean’s smile, and it’s like pulling the curtains back on a rainy day and being greeted by the sun.  It warms him, makes his own death-kissed lips turn upwards.  His pushes his bangs out of his eyes and gets a good view, etches every freckle into memory.  Because one day he’s gonna be a ghost and all he will have are these memories to reflect upon.  But until then, he will suffer beautifully in the passenger seat of the impala.  

It’s not much, but it’s all Sam needs to sprinkle a little salt around his heart.  


	10. Barbie Pink and Summer Sweet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #10 Prompt:** Crossdressing!Sam

The mirror has never been Sam’s friend, it’s never reflected what he feels inside.  But now he’s fourteen and his skin his growing faster than he can keep up with it.  No longer is he the short, chubby cheeked little kid who idolized his big Brother.  Now, he’s almost as tall as Dean and thin, his features becoming harder and more defined.  Even the monster between his legs has started to pay a lot more attention to his Brother’s every move, his heart changing form as he learns to call the heavy beat in his chest, ‘love’.  And it grows, hungrily, when Dean jabs the nickname, ‘Samantha’ into his ribs.  Because there’s an ocean of sparkly pink glitter in the back of Sam’s throat that threatens to drown him with want, every time he hears it. **  
**

But now, Sam stands, blushing and awkward, looking into the bathroom mirror and sees how a dainty, powder blue babydoll top hangs from his bony shoulders.  His fingers feel the satin straps, his thumb and pointer finger following the loops of the black bows he’s tied and he smiles at himself.  He brushes his bangs into his eyes and frames his face with his hair, he pulls on the ends and feels the tips of the strands kiss his neck.  It’s getting longer and if he squints, he can almost imagine himself as the summertime, honey-sweet fruit that Dean likes to eat.   Sam giggles, fucking giggles like some schoolyard girl who is thinking about her crush and Sam’s butterfly lashes, flutter, at the thought.

Leaning in, Sam twists the barbie pink lipstick up and puckers his lips like he’s watched girls do in several movies.  He glides the color onto his lips, his sunflower orbs coming to life as he watches himself evolve in the mirror, going from a blank coloring page, to being beautifully colored in.  And when he’s done, he rubs his lips together and pretends to blow kisses at the mirror.   Pretends that he’s the flavor Dean wants, licks his lips and imagines his mouth full of Dean’s throbbing heat.   Thinks about how his lipstick would smear all over his big Brother’s lollipop and how Dean’d sound with his Babydoll little Brother going down on him.  

Sam kisses the bathroom mirror and imagines Dean’s hip bones and it’s enough to get himself half hard, just thinking about being Dean’s pretty, pretty bedroom prize.  He pulls the front of his babydoll top taunt against his swelling self and jerks his hips upwards to glide magically on the cool satin.  It has him shuddering, his knees knocking against the cabinets underneath the bathroom sink.  “Dee–” He whispers, his barbie pink bottom lip caught between his teeth.  He grinds his drooling mess of a cock up and up and up, his fingers digging crescent moons into his thighs as he tries to hold the fabric as tight as he can.  

When he comes, he has his eyes closed, his mind chasing the sound of Dean whispering needy strings of ‘Sammy please’.  Sam feels his warm come kiss his belly as it trickles downward over his ribs, he presses the baby blue top against it and watches as it stains the fabric.  He lets it dry there as he wipes the lipstick off of his lips and puts his boyish hand-me-down pj’s on over his baby doll top.  He looks into the mirror and feels that familiar stab in his gut, as a teenage boy, a colorless page, stares back at him.  

Quietly, Sam tiptoes out of the bathroom and into the blackness of the motel room.  His eyes scan the darkness to catch the sun speckled back of his Brother, glowing under the moonlight that has snuck in through the window.  And as he crawls into bed, he finds his hands up under his boy shirt and clenching around powder blue satin.  One day, he thinks.  One day, my watermelon tongue will taste the summer sun on Dean’s cheeks.  One day, Dean’ll look at me and see how pretty I could be, just for him.  


	11. Born To Die By Your Side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #11 Prompt:** Lana Del Rey (aka where I tried to shove as many Lana song titles into one thing as I could). 
> 
> Comment below with how many song titles you spotted. :)

It’s the summer of Sam, a teenage wasteland in the passenger seat of a heart-shaped chevrolet.  Gods and monsters may be real, but it’s a cruel world full of shades of cool blue and baby blue love.  It’s a summertime sadness, one that’s got Sam's blue velvet like lungs choking on the dust of another desolate American road.  Because, they’re constantly off to the races, off to save the world; just two body electric boys in their guns and roses blaring black beauty.   **  
**

The radio plays some sticky sweet song, one that has Sam’s Diet Mountain Dew mouth aching for hidden places under that leather jacket of his Brother’s. Places like, Dean’s ribs, the ones that would sing Sam’s National Anthem every time they vibrate with explicit whispers.  And then there’s Dean’s blue jeans, the ones that hug every curve and outline every inch of that dark paradise that Sam dreams of so often.   It’s got him wishing his name was Carmen, wishing he could be some young and beautiful Lolita that could make Dean feel like a million dollar man.  

But that is a honeymoon that Sam can’t be afforded.  ‘Freak’, he thinks to himself as he sucks down the rest of his sugar soda, trying to focus on some forbidden life where driving in cars with boys doesn’t give him perpetual Motel 6 butterflies.  Instead he wishes he was high by the beach, wishes he was west coast living, wishes he could somehow convince his swan song of a heart to believe in a religion that isn’t four letters long and wouldn’t send him straight to hell.  

Sam presses his desperate knees together and focus’ on the art deco pulse in his throat and tries to tell the drum of need in his hips to go away.   Tries to leash his serial killer tongue, tries to curl his starry eyed fingers into his palms and think of anything but the slow gin fizz of a Brother in the driver’s seat.  And he’s almost saved, but then he catches Dean’s hit and run of a gaze from the corner of his eye and it has him spinning out of control again.  

“God knows I tried…” Sam whispers to the window as storm clouds swirl overhead.  It looks like the blackest day when he feels calloused, velvet crowbar fingers curl around his shoulder.  They’re strong and sturdy, they root him to this earth and they make everything around him scream with color.  ‘I’m nothing without you’, Sam thinks to himself as he leans into Dean’s hand.  

“What’d you say, Sammy?”  

Sam looks out the windshield and sees an endless road ahead, one that undoubtedly leads to a grave.   Knows he’ll get there one of two ways: the barrel of a ‘us against the world’ gun or his Brother’s dynamite tongue.   And he’s not sure which one will greet him first, but as long as they’re side by side-- sam’ll take his chances.  

“Jerk.” Sam smiles.  

“Bitch.” Dean replies and guns the engine.  


	12. When Midnight Comes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #12 Prompt:** Major Character Death

When the clock strikes twelve, everything inside of your body vibrates with a type of sorrow that words could never do justice.   The world stops spinning around you, the life you have and the ghost of the one you’ve always wanted--disappear.   It’s just you, and him, and the clock that screams of everything you’ve tried (and failed) to do.   It’s just you, and the life you were given, and price you can’t bear to pay for it. It’s just you, and the boy you’ve always called ‘home’, and the tragedy you both call ‘love’.   And you can’t breathe, you can’t fucking breathe. 

But then, he looks at you.  He looks at you and you swear you’re flayed wide open, that you’re naked before him in ways you’ve never been before.   It’s excruciatingly humiliating, to have your traitor heartbeat pulsing under his gaze, to let him see the outline of the monster you keep caged within.  He sees everything, all at once--all of the words you could never say, hanging like bats in the caves of your ribs.   And you let him see what he wants to see, what he’s always needed to know--that you love him (oh god how you love him).  Because he’s given you so much, the beat of your own heart is proof enough, and with death on his heels--he deserves to see the aching shrine in your chest.  

It’s a wordless exchange, but you know by his eyes alone--that he’s heard every secret you’ve ever kept from him.  You expected the worst, but a small smile traces across his lips and it feels like the sun rising against the blackness of night.  The gesture unravels the rope around your throat and it has you gasping for breath, because in his own eyes he’s telling you about all the ways he’s loved you too.  It’s a heavy confession that hangs in the room like it has it’s own body, like it has it’s own heart, like it has it’s own soul.   But there’s not enough time for it, there never was, not with Hell bound to the both of your heels. Not with the Hounds of it, clawing their way for his soul.

The ding of the last strike of twelve, has barely silenced before blood is spilled in ways you can’t even comprehend.   You watch, helplessly, as his love letter of a body is torn to shreds right in front of your eyes. He screams and you cry, he tries to hold on (for you, always for you), but you feel the precise moment that his intrepid pulse no longer calls you ‘home’.  And the world goes black around you.

You claw yourself back to reality with a scream that leaves your mouth, it’s his name (always his name).   You say it again and again, you cry and you beg, you plead with the world that has always betrayed you--but nothing greets you back.   You are alone in a sea of despair, with nothing but an armful of flesh and bone that once used to carry you.  And you know you’re not strong enough, know you will never make it on your own--but you still will yourself to carry him now, to carry him like he’s always done for you.  

It’s quiet and still as you place him delicately into the backseat of the impala.  The doors ache and whine, your muscles do the same, but you manage it.  You do it, because he left this world trusting you to do it. You do it, because even though you want to collapse and never move again, you promised him you’d do this.  And even if you hate him for making the deal, hate him for choosing you over himself--you will always love him far more.  

Any anger fades in the light of that love.  Love covers everything else up, cocooning it tightly, muffling those screams in the back of your throat.   Nothing remains, but that love.  And you secure it to your chest with the golden necklace you take from his body, before you bury him six feet deep, whispering, “I’m gonna find a way to get you out, I promise.” 


	13. The Storm of Our Lives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #13 Prompt:** First Time

It’s a Sunday evening, the clouds are rolling darkly by and blanketing the two lane highway in shade.  There’s a storm coming in, the air is thick with the promise of it and two summer tanned bodies are sticky with the humidity of it’s breath.   Two boys, an arms length away from each other, sweating with the heavy summer heat of a looming thunderstorm.   Both Sam and Dean are aching for a shower, aching to peel off their damp shirts, aching with their dry tongues in the back of their throats–because they’re so thirsty, so goddamned thirsty.  

It feels like centuries pass before the first big drops start splashing against the windshield.   And when the windshield wipers come alive, both boys seem to sigh in a mutual relief–because here comes the rain, here comes the respite from the heat.   The radio comes alive then, and it’s ‘More Than A Feeling by Boston’.  It’s morose, but as the raindrops quicken, the sky completely dark now, it seems to fit the moment and the thunderstrike after the first chord, sends chills down both of their spines.  And by the second chorus, they’re both singing.

Twenty miles up the road, the sky is fully open and there’s a steady downpour, one that neither of them can see through.  The clouds are angry and their stomachs are empty and starved for the promise of a good burger and fries.  They both groan, their jeans sticking to their thighs, as they pull over to the side of the road to wait for the rain to let up.  It’s just the two of them, a dark sky, and the leather seats that stick to every inch of their bodies.  And they’re both breathing shallow breaths, because the humidity in the car almost unbearable.  

Sam takes his shirt off first, peels it from his glistening torso, up and over his head and exposes the sharp collarbones that are collecting rolling beads of sweat.   Dean swallows as he tries to not look, tries not to see his Brother’s seventeen year old body as anything more, but his throat works around a swallow and his hands curl nervously around the steering wheel.  And Dean’s almost grounded himself, when Sam starts to unbuckle his jeans.  

“I’m dying, sorry.” Sam apologizes, blushing slightly, as he slowly strips off his jeans.   

Dean doesn’t apologize to Sam for letting his eyes wander down the length of those growing legs, doesn’t even flinch when Sam catches him staring.  The smell of sweat fills the car, Sam’s is sweet and Dean’s is musky and hot with desire.  The windows are drenched with it, with their heat and their breaths.  And the rain isn’t letting up, it just gets harder–angrier, another belt of rolling thunder sounding above them.  

Somehow, Dean dares to take off his own shirt, pulls the white cotton from his burning skin and almost moans when his skin can somewhat breathe again.  Sam smiles knowingly from the passenger seat and it’s got Dean nodding in agreement.  He wants to say, ‘Good idea, Sammy.’,  but his voice gets lost in the back of his throat when Sam’s eyes travel south to the shiny belt buckle around his waist.  It’s got sweat pooling between his shoulder blades, because he’s been naked a thousand times–but he feels goddamned stripped with those fox eyes on him like that.  Feels naked, even though he’s still half clothed.  

Sam’s bony fingers are there suddenly, Dean sucks in air and etches Sam’s pouty bottom lip into the back of his brain, and then his eyes are forced back down to his belt, because he can feel Sam start to pull it loose.  Dean’s fingers wind around Sam’s fingers, stilling them, as he questions Sam with his eyes.  But Sam just shakes Dean’s grip and continues to free Dean from the heat of of his tight denim.  Sam moves fast, but it’s still too slow–too fucking slow and Dean is half hard by the time the zipper is pulled down and Sam is silently telling him to lift up, so he can pull the blue jeans down.  

And it does feel better, but Dean isn’t cooling down–he’s just getting hotter.  Impossibly hot.  The sweat tickles as it travels down the side of his face and Sam is right there, beautiful and so fucking irresistible.   Dean can’t help himself from leaning forward, hands up and through Sam’s hair as he pulls his Brother into him, closing the fragile distance that still lays between them.  He claims those dumb pink lips, claims them half with his lips, half with his teeth and when Sam breathes warmly against his mouth, an airy moan trapped under his tongue, Dean knows there’s no turning back.  

It’s Sunday evening, and the summer sky is falling all around them.  ‘Losing My Religion by R.E.M’, starts to play through the speakers as two boys begin to clumsily learn how to trust those fragile heartbeats in their chests.  Hungry boyhood hips sway, lightning flashes, and the car quakes with the storm of their love.  It’s summer sweet and tastes like ‘forever’, feels like time is a concept that they can both touch, when their sweat drenched bodies both come undone.  

And when they’re arching needfully, their bodies stilled with the rocketing release from both of their bodies, the clouds above them finally part.


	14. Ode to The Purple Shirt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #14 Prompt:** Purple Dog Shirt

The first time he wears it, he’s thirteen and still soft around the edges.  He’s still small enough for you to tuck under your arm, for you to nestle your hands in the mess of his hair and to kiss his forehead innocently.  Of course, he’s old enough to punch you in the shoulder and call you an asshole, old enough to give you that guarded look--the one that threatens to either invite you in or lock you out.  The balance beam of that equation, makes your heart feel like a bowling ball in your throat, makes you feel like there’s cement in your feet.   It feels like an impending doom, like the clock is ticking and soon enough you’ll have to make a decision.  It makes you sweaty sick just thinking about it, makes you feel like clawing your skin right off the bones it’s dressed upon.  

He’s sixteen and an angsty little mother fucker.  His ears are constantly covered in headphones and his eyes are always away from you.  But you can’t seem to look away.  And you start drinking, start hoping amber liquid bottles will settle the inner turmoil of losing a boy’s gentle gaze.  It starts to feel like mourning, like you’ve lost the only reason you breathed in the first place.  But it’s just growing pains, just your baby bird finally standing on their own legs, finally finding out they had wings the whole time, that they never needed you to fly in the first place.   You want to tell him that you miss him, even when he’s sleeping on the bed next to yours, the purple shirt visible from where the blanket lifts off the bed.  You want to tell him that you miss his skin, his touch--because he’s the only thing that ever made you feel loved in the first place.  

You’re drunk and high, and he’s sticky sweet with the taste of weed on his lips.  His cheeks are something illegal, that shade of pink, and you feel yourself writing odes to his blushing apples.  You wonder when things changed, when thirteen year old him and his softness turned into a sharp seventeen.  Wonder when he became eye level, when he started to fill out that deadly purple shirt.  Deadly, because he looks like sin in it, looks like everything you always wanted but never knew you wanted--until that exact moment.   And he’s giggling, fucking giggling, as he cranes his neck up to the sky and closes his eyes.   He’s happy, he’s free, and he’s finally looking at you again.  And you’re finally breathing, finally waking from his teenaged winter, finally believing that there’s still a sun in that big ass sky above.  His fox eyes tease, they bat and dare you closer; he’s a fire that you just have to touch once--even if you know it’s gonna leave you riddled with scars.  

He’s barely scratched eighteen, when you let his poisoned apple lips press to your throat.  It’s too many things at once and the world is spinning madly beneath your feet.  The letter he hid from you is crumpled on the floor and there’s heavy apologies hanging in his sunlit eyes as he looks at you.  And for the first time in your entire life, you want to look away from him.  But then he kisses you, brushes your lips with his own and it rips open the bandaid ache you’ve bandaged your heart in all of these years.  In a matter of breaths, you’re bleeding out in front of him and you feel exposed--raw, right down to the soul.  He’s gonna take it or leave it, he’s gonna love it or hate it and you have no say, you never did.  He was always your everything, and now you stand to lose it all.  And if this is it, if this is how you’re gonna die--let his fire tongue ravage you whole, let his smoke stack arms build you a coffin out of that heart-shaped pulse in his throat.   Rest. In. Pieces.

You’ve barely been driving by his side for a week, barely stopped your eyes from casting over to the passenger seat and expecting it to be empty, only to be relieved when it’s filled with the heat of his body.  You’ve barely got him back, when it feels like you’re losing him all over again.  He’s twenty-two and his whole life just went up in flames, but it feels like he’s sixteen again.  Sixteen and unable to look you in the eyes, sixteen and locking himself behind iron bars--ones you’ve never been able to get behind.  You wring your fingers around the steering wheel and try telling yourself that it’s different this time, that it’s because he’s broken and not because he doesn’t love you anymore.   He wears the purple shirt a lot these days, wears it under his clothes and wears it to bed every night.   You try snagging it away to wash it and he comes out of his shell just enough to expose the angry beast he’s been hiding from you.  And that’s when you smell the purple fabric, it smells of apples and strawberries, of blonde hair and sunshine.   It’s the last thing he has of her, and you almost stole it from him.  You find yourself a bar nearby and you drink yourself into oblivion.  You drink yourself into someone else’s arms and try to burn the jealousy of summer fruit from your veins.  

The last time he wears it, is a couple of months later.  It starts with the way he keeps brushing into you all day, as though his skin is betraying him by finding excuses to touch yours.  As though, he has no say in it, like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.  It’s later that night that his eyes burn holes into you, laser sunbeams carving needs into the sides of your face.  There’s an ache in his bones, an urgency in his breath, and a hole in his chest.   And there’s only one you, but his trembling fingers, sprouting around your wrists like spring flowers, are telling you that you’re enough--that you’ve always been enough.  You curl your own fingers around the hem of his purple shirt and you look deep into those summer suns, silently asking for permission.   He nods, bravely, his eyes never leaving yours and when it’s up and over his head, his ribs bare for you to see, he doesn’t flinch once.  Instead he kisses you with his hellfire lips and you let him drown you both in the smoke he’s been holding in his lungs.  And it tastes like ash, like things stolen, but somehow it tastes familiar.  It feels like your four years again,  feels like you’re finally looking back, even though your father had always warned you not to.  


	15. Monster in the Sheets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week # 15 Prompt:** Daddy's Lil Monster t-shirt
> 
> A/N: Nsfw. Weecest (Sam is sixteen). Daddy!kink.

Sam’s sixteen and all growing length and sharp angled bones.   His body is awkward, it’s shedding the innocence of childhood and stretching for the fullness of adolescence.  Dean’s hand-me-downs only seemingly hang from his body, like his skeleton is nothing more than a hanger.  They never end up looking half as good on himself as they ever did on Dean.  But he desperately needs new clothes, so he’ll take what he can get.   **  
**

There’s a pile of clothes on the bed that Dean left for him to go through.   He’s hoping for a better pair of jeans, as the ones he has are ripped in too many places and fraying around the ankles.   And he thinks he sees a pair, reaches for them and instead catches a glimpse of a white shirt that doesn’t look familiar in the slightest.  He brings it up in front of his face, looks it over and reads the letters on the front of it.  

‘Daddy’s Lil Monster.’

Sam’s horny cock stirs with the words, fills with the unexpectedness of seeing this shirt in the pile.  His cheeks fill with pink, every inch of his skin raising in goosebumps, because he knows Dean’s never worn this shirt a day in his life.  Knows that Dean purposefully picked it out and put in the pile for Sam to come across innocently enough.  Knows that Dean’s out at the store, hoping his little Brother catches a goddamned hint.  

And fuck, Sam’s caught it.   

When Dean comes back to the hotel, the lights are out except for the bedside lamp.   The light is dim and it barely catches Sam’s bare legs, the ones that are spread wide.   But Dean sees him, sees him like a fucking cat sees its prey in the middle of the night.  And Sam’s spine arches into the light, begging for Dean to see the rest of him.  

“Jesus…”  It falls from Dean’s mouth like a prayer.  As though something from his dreams has just appeared before his eyes.  

Sam feels Dean’s eyes trace the shirt around his torso, feels as Dean’s breath hitches as he notices the way one side seems to hang off his shoulder, exposing skin in a way that makes Dean’s goddamned tongue wag behind his teeth.  And Sam’s blushing now, his bangs hanging into his line of view, hiding his sinful fox eyes.

Dean’s moving then, his hands already fast at work to remove his leather jacket and black t-shirt.  He’s got his fingers fumbling with his belt as his knees come to rest against the side of the mattress.  And that’s when he sees the wet stain from where Sam’s cock has been hiding under the shirt.  

“So hard for you, Dee…”  Sam flexes forward, let's Dean see how his dick presses against the white fabric, leaking more precome with the heat of finally having Dean’s eyes on him.  

Dean grunts then, deep in the back of his throat, like a wild animal caught in the goddamned wild.   The sound of his belt buckle clanking to the floor comes quickly behind, followed by his jeans and boxers.  And then he’s there, right between Sam’s legs, his weight indenting the bed and forcing Sam’s body closer to his.  Sam’s lips open as a breath of want escapes his mouth, because he’s never been so fucking thirsty for skin in his life.  And Dean’s eyes read of the same sentiment.  

Sam feels Dean lean closer into him, but he pushes Dean back and silently shows him that he’s calling the shots tonight.  That he’s gonna show his big Brother exactly what kind of monster he can be for _his_ Daddy.  And it starts with Dean on his back and Sam’s mouth flirting with the tip of his Brother’s cock, his lips ghosting there--promising of things to come.  

Dean’s belly tightens every time Sam’s lips dust the top of his dick and the sight makes Sam never want to stop.  But he surprises them both and takes Dean down to the balls, all in one fluid motion.  The head of Dean’s cock presses tightly to the back of his throat and he can taste his Brother’s want against his tongue.  Sam swallows, gagging, but he doesn’t move.  

“Oh my god…” Dean pants, his eyes and head falling back and then popping back up fast.  His entire body humming with the want to relinquish into the sensations, but not wanting to miss a moment of it--all at the same time.  

Sam pulls off then, licks his lips and traces his eyes up to meet Dean’s in the low light.  “You like that, _Daddy_?”

Dean whispers a chain of profanities under his breath, as he looks down at Sam’s shirt and back up into the sinful look that paints his Brother’s eyes.  He can see his deathbed reflecting back at him, one he’ll happily crawl into.  He doesn’t need anything else.  Just this.  

Only this.  

“How about this...”  Sam questions, his body climbing the length of Dean.  He comes to straddle his big Brother, their aching cocks laying side by side. “ _Daddy_?”

“Yes... _fuck_ , yes--Sammy.”  Dean’s voice is husky with lust.

“You mean,” Sam leans forward, his tongue licking a stripe along Dean’s throat, gets his mouth right next to Dean’s ear.  “ _Monster_?”

Dean’s hips buck at Sam’s words, his cock poking Sam’s belly and then coming to lie next to Sam’s again.  Sam’s lips smile next to Dean’s pulse approvingly. And then Sam’s moving to Dean’s mouth, kissing to bite at his bottom lip.  

“Say it.”  Sam whispers.  “Wanna hear you say it.”  

“Monster?” Dean asks.  

Sam kisses Dean deep, hums a ‘mhmm’ against his mouth.

“Is that what you are?” Dean’s voice is pure sex, his hands reaching for handfuls of Sam’s hair.   His fingers tangle in the soft brown strands and he pulls gently, just enough to pull Sam away from him.  “Daddy’s lil monster?”

Sam fucks downward at those words and Dean doesn’t hesitate to meet his hips.  Their cocks tangle between their bodies, the friction of their skins together creating an euphoric sensation for the both of them.  They grind together, their fingers clawing at the other’s skin, their breaths littering the room around them and echo back against them.  

They’re both so close, so close.  

Dean watches Sam above him, watches how he moves with the utmost of intent, watches how the shirt he found at Goodwill, slinks up and down on Sam’s body with his every move.  Watches how Sam’s bangs cascade into his eyes as he looks down at him.  

“Daddy, please…” Sam whines suddenly, his voice cracking.  “Please, please….”  

“Show Daddy how good of a monster you are…” Dean lures, his own balls tensing with his words.  

And then the world goes blinding white, the both of them forgetting how to breathe.   Warm ropes of come streak the space between them, covering both of their bellies messily.   The aftershocks rock them, their hips still grinding and the ghost of orgasm still haunting their bones.  

Sam falls next to Dean, his bony arms finding themselves around his big Brother.   He cuddles close, finding comfort in the smell of Dean’s sweat.   And then he kisses Dean’s chest, waking him from his post orgasm lull.  

“You’re gonna kill me, baby boy.”  Dean grins with the words.   

Sam echoes Dean’s grin and whispers naughtily, “I’ll always be your baby boy in the streets and the monster in your sheets.”

And just like that, Dean’s half hard all over again.

“You really are a fucking monster, Jesus…”  

Sam laughs.  “You know it.”


	16. Is This What Love Looks Like?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #16 Prompt:** Fist Fight

He doesn’t know how to say, _I love you_. 

But his eyes do know how to pin your bones to the wall, they flay you open wide and take stock of your insides. A violent dissection of love. And he is looking for something in particular, looking for that heart-shaped organ that beats only for him, making sure his initials are still carved in deep enough. 

He asks you a question, sounds something like, _Where have I gone wrong?_

You can’t hide the roaring pulse of freedom in your veins, he can see your wandering feet and he knows what it means. You’ve been caught red handed with a map of dreams attached to your wrists, he sees the directions that tell you _how_ to leave. And his lip curls into something ugly, it’s a trigger response. 

He doesn’t know how to say, _please don’t leave_. 

But his fist does sting as it collides into the sharpness of your cheek, his eyes go from dreamy sea foam to stormy skies and if you didn’t know him--you’d think the absolute worst. You’d read hatred into that fist, into those eyes, into the sting of his bones against yours. If you couldn’t still feel the echo of his kiss on your lips, if you couldn’t remember the touch of his calloused fingers against your spine--you could almost believe the tough-as-nails act. 

His voice is quiet now, his fingers around your throat-- _How could you do this to me?_

You struggle against his curling fingers, against the tombstone bones that crave to bury you whole, so you can never leave him. But the harder you strain against him, the stronger the hold becomes and it’s got your own life preserver hands up and swinging wide and low. Your knuckles collide into ribs, reminding him to breathe and your eyes ache around the tears that you don’t allow yourself to shed. 

He doesn’t know how to say, _you’re all I have_.

But his hands do let you go, they fall to his sides like giant white flags and it’s got you tangled up inside. You reach for him, but he shrinks away and it feels like another punch to the face. His eyes look like ghosts that haunt the back of your skull and you’re desperate to bring them back to life. You reach again, fist his shirt and pull him close, pulling him to twist and pushing him into the same wall he just had you pinned to. 

He’s breathless when his voice shakes out the words, _You’re gonna be the death of me._

You kiss him then, bold and biting to bleed. The blood in the mouth tastes like home and you press the promise of it against his throat. Because even your wandering feet could never lead you too far astray, the map at your wrist may be in cursive, but it swallows and circles his name. You fix a promise to his heart, digging it into his flesh with your own fingers and teeth. 

_I love you_ , you say the words he cannot. 

But his fist in the back of your hair and his quivering lips--say enough. 


	17. When Your Brother Is The Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #17 Prompt:** Freckles

The first time Sam sees them clearly, he’s six months old and curled up in his Brother’s shivering arms. Smoke curls around them, his milk filled stomach pulling at the seams with the gravity of a loss that he won’t understand for years to come. It’s a pale sky, but in the tragedy of midnight, he can see every single one with glaring clarity. 

He’s five when he wishes on one of them for the first time. _Wish I may_ , his toothless grin spreads, _wish I might_. He doesn’t voice it out loud, but he lets the vowels in ‘home’ sing loudly within his ribs. 

They’re lying on the hood of the impala, gazing up at the sky and Dean’s telling him about galaxies and planets. He’s just ten, but Dean’s fourteen and amazingly passionate about the great big sky. Dean traces his fingers, connecting the dots of complex constellations and Sam can’t help feel his heart trace a few of its own. 

He’s fifteen and his bones ache with the pace in which they sprout. Dean tells him if he doesn’t stop growing, he’ll touch the sky one day. And Sam prays, fucking hopes--that one day he will be lucky enough to do just that. 

Seventeen comes in the middle of the night and sneaks up the length of his body. Suddenly he’s no longer looking up, he’s no longer arching that neck of his up to the sky. His hips betray him as he tries to count pinpricks of color, trying to see just how many wishes of his hang hopelessly before his very own eyes. He asks Dean if he believes in aliens and the world tilts on it’s axis when he says that he doesn’t. Because Sam is in outer space, his rocket ship heart housing something extraterrestrial indeed. 

He’s eighteen when he sees his first comet, it roars against the pale sky in roaring red. His lips tremble when they land on the moon that they’ve always secretly howled at. Because finally, the sky he’s always loved, finally reaches back for him. It’s just like Dean had warned, because now he’s tall enough to touch the sky and his hand shakes as they trace the thousands of constellations he’s spent his entire life reaching for. 

Twenty-two hits hard and somehow they find themselves parked out in the middle of nowhere, doing what they haven’t done in years--stargazing. Dean’s looking up into the great unknown and he’s confessing about how he had made up a lot of stars he talked about when he was younger. Says, “That’s why none of my wishes ever came true.” But then he presses his thumb against Sam’s mole and adds, “well--all but _one_.” Sam looks into the only sky he’s ever known and blushes brightly. And he watches as one of his own wishes comes true right before his eyes, when Dean’s mouth curls around the words --’ _Sammy, it’s always been you_.’ 

Sam traces the milky way of Dean’s nose with his lips and then cups the only star-freckled sky he’s ever cared about. He lets his hands touch the stars that he’s spent his entire life reaching for and he whispers back-- 

“Dean, it’s always been _you_ , too.”


	18. Heliophilia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #18 Prompt:** Unrequited
> 
>  
> 
> _Heliophilia - (n.) Desire to stay in the sun; love of sunlight_  
> 

He’s yours, completely-one-hundred percent- _yours_.

It’s never been a question, there’s no other hands in this world that could know him better. You could find every scar with your eyes closed, would know them by heart, because you’ve stiched up half of them yourself. His smile hangs from the back of your throat, the light of it reflecting inside of your ribs and filling you to the seams with something you can’t even vocalize.

He’s yours, always has been-- _always will be_ , or so your heart protests.

And he is, until he isn’t.

You don’t even see it happening, until it’s already too late. One second its you and him against the world, and in the next he’s telling you that his skin wasn’t made to stand in your shadow.

“I can’t do this anymore.” He says.

And it’s like you’ve been ejected through the windshield, like you’re flying through the air and hitting the pavement of reality-- _hard_. His eyes are begging you to not make this harder than it needs to be, but your chest is six sizes too small for the heartache that’s trying to break it’s way into your aching bones.

“What are you talking about?” Your lips spit.

Where else could he belong? Where else could his bones rest, if not in the passenger seat? Your hands shake as you try to picture a world without him by your side, the desperate hounds of grief are barking up the back of your throat and they’re threatening to evacuate your mouth. It won’t be pretty if he sees the monster you’ve kept inside. So you swallow it back down, you beg it to calm down--to go back to sleep, but it screams even louder.

 _HE IS GOING TO LEAVE YOU_ , it says angrily. _HE IS GOING TO LEAVE YOU AND YOU WILL HAVE NOTHING_ , it reminds your heart. _YOU WILL HAVE NOTHING_ , it focuses on the jugular. _YOU WILL BE_ , it cuts deeply, NOTHING--and now you’re bleeding out.

“Hey,” He says, worried. “It’s not like that.”

The blood from your body is spilling out onto the black leather seats and he’s eyeing you like you’re a box that he’s been carrying around for years, labeled in big black letters as ‘fragile’.

He’s always been the sun, the moon, the whole damn sky, and it’s billions of uncountable, nameless stars. He’s always been yours-- _your_ sun, _your_ moon, _your_ whole damn sky and he’s always been _every_ goddamned countless fucking star in it. And now he’s the black hole that will consume it all, will rip every last thing you love right from your fucking fingertips.

“What do you,” You try. “Where will you,” Your throat tightens. “Go?”

What happened to the little boy that looked up to you, who wrapped himself endlessly around your body? What happened to being his everything, to being the only thing he needed? When did those long growing bones decide that they didn’t need you anymore? That they didn’t fit beside you? That you somehow, weren’t enough anymore?

He’s always been yours, but were you ever _his_?

He hands you a letter and you put on the bravest face you’ve ever had to wear. It tells you that he’s been accepted to Stanford, that it’s a full ride and you read it again, trying to find the place where it says it’s all a big joke. But the more you read, the more you feel like the life you’ve lived, the one you believed in and the only thing that’s ever brought you joy--is all a big fucking lie.

“It’s only for a couple of years.” He adds, trying to fit bandaids onto the gaping wounds.

But he knows as well as you do, that years are the equivalent to eternities. And they are not promised to those who live the life you lead. This could be ‘it’, this could be the last time he ever sits beside you and exists like the heaven he is. Tomorrow will come, for him--but not for you. Instead you will be a gaping minefield of things you want to say, but that you never will. He will leave you haunted, hanging in the past like a memory and he will be happy.

Without you.

He’s yours, or so you always believed. But the truth is, he’s always belonged to the world, moreso than your own two arms.

“I’m happy for you.” It’s a lie.

“Are you,” He sounds skeptical. “Sure?”

The monster inside of you roars against your ribs. STAY!, it screams. DON’T LEAVE ME GODDAMN IT!, now it’s begging. PLEASE!, it’s down on it’s knees. DON’T GO!, please please please.

You nod to him, ruffle his hair and give him the best ‘I-just-want-what-is-best-for-you’ smile. And he buys it, buys it like he buys all the cheap jokes you’ve ever told him. He’s always been a sucker, always been so easy to fool. You could laugh, if it didn’t make you want to puke.

“Yea,” You say.

I LOVE YOU, IF YOU LEAVE ME I’LL NEVER BE THE SAME!, the monster in your ribs still tries. DONT LET HIM LEAVE! YOU’RE A FUCKING FOOL!, now it’s screaming at you.

“Thanks.”

He’s happy and god it makes you want to bask in the glow of those hopeful eyes.

“You’re welcome.” You hand him the letter back, stamping it with the remnants of your broken heart.

But he’ll never see the bloody smears, he’ll never know the ways he’s ruined you.

Maybe he was always destined to blow your heart apart, you were just too blind to see it coming. Too dumb to think it could of ended up any other way. You can’t keep something that doesn’t belong to you; can’t make him stay if his heart is telling him that he has to go.

He’s not yours, and maybe--your heart shatters around the possibility--he  _ never _ was to begin with.


	19. It's Better This Way

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #19 Prompt** : "I'm proud of us."
> 
> A/N: Obviously deals with the S!9 finale, so here's your warning for MCD.

Dean Winchester is not particularly proud of many things in his life, hell--there’s a long list of things that he wishes he could just erase from his past altogether. Things that haunt him in the middle of the night, things that he likes to drown with the bottom of a whiskey bottle, things he tries to run away from, because it hurts too much to face them.

And with death upon him, with the sharp end of an angel blade pointed directly for his ribs, his mind decides to remind him of every reason why that blade deserves to be driven through his body in the first place.

Suddenly he’s six years old and there’s a burning flare of anger in his chest when he looks at his Brother. It’s strong and it’s bright, has him resenting the day his baby Brother was born. Because, after all, he is the reason why their mother went up in smoke.

Fast forward and he’s twelve, his own needs aching behind his teeth and can’t he just have two seconds to himself, can’t he just fucking breathe? Why does he have to watch after Sam all the time? Sam and his questions, always his questions--questions that don’t have answers. And he’s tired, twelve and goddamned tired. He never asked for this life; why is it so hard?

He’s sixteen and he’s become the mirror image of his father; good little soldier. And he wars his frustrations on his Brother: _‘The Family Business’ is all that there is, there’s no time for dreams. Schoolwork won’t save your life, Sammy. English won’t teach you how to reload your gun._ Sam is twelve and his bright eyes fade every time Dean tells him there’s no other life, there’s nothing but this--blood, guts, and grief.

Then, he’s eighteen and there’s parts of his chest that want to write Sam’s initials all over them, parts of him that shouldn’t want that at all--but he’s cornered with Sam’s awkward teenage limbs and growing independence. Things like Sam’s first date, shouldn’t make Dean want to obliterate entire cities, shouldn’t make him want to bury pretty girls that blink their little jeweled eyes at _his_ Sammy.

Suddenly he’s twenty-one and Sam’s leaving for Stanford, doing exactly what he was always told that he couldn’t do--escape. And there’s parts of him that resent his Brother for wanting anything else in this world, but him. How can Sam not see the roped lies that tangle around his throat, the ones that say, _Good luck--_ but are choking down, _Please don’t go._ The world is too big without Sam by his side, it’s an endless sea of unrequited black nights and there’s not enough liquor bottles to keep him afloat.

He’s twenty-four and burying himself into nameless bodies, trying to carve out the only name that sings in his veins.

Twenty-six and he’s upside down and completely lost, Dad’s missing and he can’t go another day without seeing his Brother’s face. _Whoa, easy--Tiger..._ is what he says, but it sounds more like-- _it’s been too long and I’m sorry, so sorry_. Sam doesn’t want to go with him, but he’s desperate, begging for goddamned crumbs and he takes what he can get. Just one job, one job. Please, just one job.

He’s still twenty-six when he watches his Brother lose everything to the same lick of fire that tore their family apart. Twenty-six and he wants to claw his skin off, because if he hadn’t come back, if he didn’t ask Sammy to come with him, if he just kept his dirty paws out of his Brother’s life--none of this would have happened. Sam talks in his sleep, says things that Dean once told him, _There’s no life outside of hunting, you’re a fool to believe. Goddamned stupid to hope._ Dean’s twenty-six and he wishes more than anything it was him on the ceiling and not Sam’s entire life.

From there it’s lightning flashes of the last eight years, rapidly firing before his eyes: Sam’s first death, a knife to his back and the pain he hides delicately beneath the flesh of his wrists when he learns of the deal Dean made to bring him back. The times Dean was harder on him than he should’ve been, Sam’s swan dive, his soulless smile, Hell’s trauma, the trials...Sam’s ‘ _So?’_ hanging boldly between his ears.

And it all brings him to this, to this moment with death upon him and he’s so tired, so tired of ruining everything that he touches--especially Sam. Only Sam.

Sam, whose voice sounds now, hammering against the wearhouse walls as he sees the dark fate that is coming for his Brother. “Dean!”

Dean smiles at him, gives him the only good thing left in him, saves it just for him--only for him. Their eyes meet the second the blade makes its way through his skin and bone, his breath being knocked from his lungs and it’s not fear he feels, but goddamned relief.

Minutes later, Sam’s telling him that it’s gonna be okay. And for that he can agree, because yes, Sam’s gonna be just fine--without him atlast. Won’t have to worry about his life meddling Brother who screws everything up, his heart too crooked for the space it beats between. His heart that is slowing now, with every futile beat it makes.

“Hey-hey.” Sam’s got his hands on his face, his palms shaking with the weighted reality of Dean’s last breaths. “Dean? Hey!”

Dean doesn’t have much in him left, but he does have one last thing he’s been dying to say. And well, isn’t that funny?

Sam’s hanging onto him like his own life is in the balance and Dean pushes himself to the surface of endless cotton.

Dean Winchester is not proud of a lot of things, that is true--but there’s one glimmering thread of hope, of reason, that has held him together for all of his years.

He gets a grip of Sam’s face and tries to bury the meaning of his next words, as deep as they will go into galaxy that is his Brother--tries to give birth to a star that will shine bright in the darkness, just for him--always for him.

“I’m proud of us.” He says, because the words ‘I love you’ are too big.

 _I’m proud of you._ He thinks with his last gasp of oxygen.

 _Always you_.

 _Only you_.


	20. Stitches & Broken Bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #20 Prompt:** Patching each other up

_As long as I’m around, nothing bad is gonna happen to you._

It’s a mantra that starts with baby-skin scraped knees, playground cuts and bruises. _Gotta be careful, Sammy._ Peroxide cotton balls and wisps of breath against the wound. _You want Batman or Superman?_ Followed by tearful smiles when the Caped Crusader is gently pressed over the wound.

But as the years pass by, the simplicity of little wounds fade into the background. They feel like tickles in comparison to the gaping wounds that replace them. Things that bleed too fast, that pale the skin and leave the lungs breathless. There are no words for those battle wounds, for the knives that went too deep, for the bullets that caught more than just the surface of skin, for the hard fought and bloody knuckles, for the broken ribs and busted lips.

_Gotta breathe._ The sound of reset bones echoing throughout another shady motel room. _Here, bite down on this._ Liquor poured directly onto screaming flesh. _Don’t move, unless you want an ugly scar._ Needle and thread being pushed through broken skin, gently closing it back up again. _Put some ice on that._ A throbbing lip and a swollen cheek. _Let me see._ Careful eyes inspecting the gnawing flesh around scabbed over knuckles.

And then there are the times when it’s too much, it’s too big and too red and there’s not enough goddamned time. _Sammy! Hey, hey, stay with me--stay with me!_ Times when it’s nothing but the calamity of their hearts beating wildly in their chests, both with the pressure of time, because if they’re not fast enough, if their skilled fingers don’t weave the thread just right, if it bleeds too much, if their eyes roll back into their head, if they aren’t careful...it could end disastrously.

It could end for good.

But the mantra repeats, over and over again. Repeats until it’s the only truth they are willing to cling to; the only one they’ll except.

_As long as I’m around…_

There’s nothing in this world that can tear us apart--

_...nothing bad is gonna happen to you._

\--not even your own flesh and blood.


	21. I'm Your National Anthem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #21 Prompt:** The Fourth of July
> 
> A/N: lyrics and title are from National Anthem by Lana Del Rey

_He says to ‘be cool’, but I don’t know how yet._

He’s seventeen and aching in the passenger seat. His body singing to you across the leather distance, his pink lips and his dimpled cheeks, his sharp bones sprouting like goddamned rose thorns and you’re ready to bleed. It’d be worth it, a death so sweet, at the foot of that chapstick smeared shrine he calls a mouth.

You’re twenty-something with a black hole for a heart. And you’re gonna eat him alive.

_Wind in my hair, hand on the back of my neck._

His fingers find themselves curled around your wrists, around your neck, around the bend of your knee and they reek of innocence, one you’d love to taint with the lick of your tongue and the dig of your hips. He looks at you like you’re a long lost world wonder and you gaze back at him under the hood of ‘I need you bad’ lashes. The windows are down and your chest is going into overdrive.

You’re gonna combust on the side of the road and his hands will be painted blood red.

_I sing the National Anthem while I’m standing over your body._

Summer hot nights in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but the sticky-sweet heat that licks the knobs of his spine and clings to his ratty, second-hand store t-shirt. The same heat that has cobwebs growing in your mouth and your caterpillar tongue cocooning itself to the back of your molars, because if you breath too deeply you’re gonna explode into warmth seeking moths and leave your dust kisses all over his summer tanned skin.

You’re gonna bury your hands into depths of his chest and you’re gonna fashion yourself a casket out of his ribs.

_Red, white, blue's in the skies, summer's in the air and baby, heaven's in your eyes._

His lips crash into yours on the side of the road and for a second you think you’ve died and gone upstairs, it’s got you reaching your fingers to your throat and reassuring yourself there’s still a pulse. He’s a wild animal, his hands wrapping around your neck like a cobra and his pink half-moons anchoring themselves to your mouth. He kisses like he’s been starving for years, kisses like he’s trying to suck your soul into his own ribs so he’ll never have to hunger again.

You’re declaring a holiday in your heart, marking it with exploding pink hearts and glittering fireworks.

_Tell me I'm your National Anthem._

He’s calling your name, his hands and knees leaving hollywood stars into the black leather seats. He’s singing it out loud, singing it at the top of his lungs and it sounds like church bells at midnight, sounds like everything you’ve ever hoped it’d to be. And you’re laying claim to every inch of his skin, leaving declarations at his throat, his sides and the backs of his knees. You devour his wet moans and pin them inside your own ribs, naming them like astronomers name constellations.

You’re going to hell, your heart stitching four letters together and calling it ‘l-o-v-e’.

_I’m your National Anthem. Boy put your hands up, give me a standing ovation._

He’s seventeen and growing like hemlock in the garden of your heart. And you’ll die just for one taste, just for one lick, one swallow of him. He looks over at you and you hear gunshots, he reaches for your face and the world goes black, he kisses you and the world goes silent around you.

Your heart even stills, too scared to beat, to make noise and scare his love away.

_Boy put your hands up, give me a standing ovation._

You’re twenty-something and calling him God. _(God, you’re beautiful. God, I’ve waited so long. God, you’re gonna be the death of me. God, fuck--god.)_ And he just blushes, bright red swirling across his cheeks and it looks like The Fourth of July.


	22. Greedy Hands, Poisoned Apples

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #22 Prompt:** Kill or Be Killed

Dean Winchester is not a murderer, but he could be.

It just depends, you see. Depends on the way the wind blows, the way the moon cranes her head in the sky, the way the grass sounds underfoot in the quietness of midnight. It’s not so much an itch that one has to scratch, but a switch that can be flipped with the pressure of the right circumstances.

Ones like:

Pale skin glowing in the passenger seat, knobby knees rubbing against the dashboard and root-like fingers aching around them like they just need something to anchor themselves into. That they just need to belong to something bigger than themselves, that they need to sink into someone else’s flesh and sprout like wildflowers along the spine.

Dean watches from the corner of his eye, his attention never tearing completely away from the road ahead of them. His fingers curl tighter around the steering wheel and he swallows a violent emotion down, wills it to dislodge and digest.

_He is not a murderer--_

But baby pink lips stain the back of his eyes, where they bruise and bite. They smear like blood against his throat and it’s got him cursing lethal obscenities to himself.

_\--but he could be._

**

The first time foreign hands put themselves on that stretch of holy skin, Dean feels something within himself shift. Hands drag across the cheek, down the neck, over those baby bird ribs--so easy to break, finally resting against the drum of life. Dean focuses in and his brain sizzles out, like an egg yolk sticking to the bottom of a pan.

_Don’t touch him._

That candy apple bottom lip pulls around a smile, painting someone else’s face with the only sun Dean’s ever known. And it feels like his ziploc-bag lungs have been punctured, feels like his pulse is drag racing around his throat, feels like he wants to rip every star from the goddamned sky and overdose on their light--just to be worthy of that sun once again.

He sighs when he realizes that he cannot carve stars out of the sky, but smiles wickedly instead--because he can carve hearts out of chests.

**

When Baby Boy asks Dean later why he did it, his first instinct is to lie--to tell him he had no choice in the matter. But those summer eyes pin against his own, those butterfly lashes spinning webs to catch the lies that rest on his tongue. But Baby Boy just stares down at Dean’s crimson soaked hands, curling his own behind his back, like sunflowers turning their heads away when darkness comes.

Dean’s heart is a funhouse mirror and it reflects the atrocity of his heart, all gaping wounds and rotting flesh. And if one were to look hard enough, you’d see a sea of red--thick and pungent--as though it were still swimming through veins. Glinting in the seafoam of red, you’d see teeth, sparkling like stars in the sky--because _maybe_ , maybe you can pull them from the sky after all.

“It felt like dying.” Dean whispers finally and it’s a truth as bold as the stolen life on his hands. “If not them--it would’ve been me.”

And there it is, the jugular-- _exposed_.

**

Dean Winchester is not a murderer, not by choice--not by want.

But if you touch his Baby Brother (in love, in hatred--doesn’t matter),

\-- _he’ll become one_.  
  



	23. The Voicemail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #23 Prompt:** The Voicemail

It’s barely three days after everything in his life went to shit, when Dean finds it.

Sam’s cell phone.

There’s a hunger in his ribs as he feels the weight of it in his hands, because he knows it’s the last thing he has of his Brother.

It’s only been days, but it feels like centuries since he’s heard his Brother’s voice, felt his touch, or has felt half alive himself. If he could time travel, he’d go back just far enough to convince Sam that there has to be another way to end the apocalypse, something less painful--something less permanent.

He calls Sam’s phone with his own, lets it vibrate in his other hand until it finally gives up and forwards him to the voice he knew would be there.

_‘It’s Sam. Leave a message.’_

Dean’s jaw tenses with the sound of his Brother’s voice, his stomach twisting like a snake in the depths of his hips. He’s gonna be sick, he’s gonna… But he swallows sour bile down and hangs up, only to push redial. It rings forever, longer than it should and then forwards him to Sam’s voice again.

_‘It’s Sam. Leave a message.’_

There’s dead air after the beep and it’s got tears pricking the back of Dean’s eyes. He wants to say so much, wants to curl his arms around Sam’s voice and hug it tightly to his chest--never to let it go.

He should have never let his Brother go.

“I--I mis... S-sammy...come back. _Please_.”

He hangs up again and lets the tears come, lets them boil up from where he’s kept them buried in his chest and lets them soak his cheeks. His throat hiccups around them, because there’s sobs that are too big and violent--they feel like razorblades against the throat. But he lets the pain swallow him up for a second, allows himself to be empty and hollowed out--lets the weight of Sam’s decision squeeze the air of his lungs until they burn with the reminder to breathe.

Sam’s cell phone vibrates, the screen flashing with the notification of a new voicemail. It’s just enough to pull Dean back to the surface of his grief, to get him focusing on Sam’s phone. His fingers tremble as he pushes the voicemail key without thinking. And his chest tightens again with the expectation of his voice and his sorrowful and pathetic pleas.

 _‘You have one new message and one saved message.’_ The voicemail voice says.

Dean grits his teeth through his message and feels a flare of momentary anger flash inside his lungs. Because it’s quite self indulgent to wallow in his pain, when his Brother is quite literally burning in Hell. He doesn’t deserve to mourn, doesn’t deserve to leave lovesick voicemails when he did nothing to save Sam from the bottomless cage where he now resides. He presses delete and concedes himself to be miserable quietly.

_‘Message deleted, press one to listen to your saved message.’_

His fingers hesitate over the one, because it’s really none of his business what voicemail Sam had decided to save. But there’s another side of him that makes excuses with himself. The side of him that begs to differ, the one that whispers-- _does it even matter anymore_? And it’s got him agreeing with it, because no--it doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters. So he presses the one.

_‘Message saved on May 14th, 2009._

_Listen to me, you bloodsucking freak. Dad always said I’d either have to save you or kill you. Well, I’m giving you fair warning. I’m done trying to save you. You’re a monster sam--a vampire. You’re not you anymore. And there’s no going back._

_End of saved messages. To repeat, press two.’_

Dean pulls the phone from his ear and feels the world fall away below him, feels it crumble to dust and explode into nothing. Because it’s his voice, _him_ saying those vile untrue things--things he’s never uttered a day in his life. Things Sam heard and saved, things he believed until his final breath just three days ago.

Dean’s own voice repeats in the back of his head. ‘ _I’m done trying to save you. I’m done, I’m done--trying to save you. Save you. Dad always said--always said I’d have to save you or kill you. Kill you. Kill you.’_ It echoes again and again, intensifying as he focuses on the details of those words, shaping themselves into bullets and lodging themselves into his chest. Images of Sam’s spread arms run before his eyes, that last look they shared--the one that spoke loudly of unsaid words.

Almost like Sam was saying, _‘It’s okay, it’s okay… you don’t have to do it--I’ll do it myself.’_

All the air evacuates Dean’s lungs with this thought, his chest dividing into two halves as the world before him goes blurry with tears.

“No--Sammy...no.”

Dean lets out a sob and is surprised at the weight of it. It’s ugly and wet, soaked in regret and pain--and everything he never told Sam, but should’ve.

He hits redial again, his breath panting with the labor of trying to control his tears. It’s another millennia before it finally forwards him to voicemail and it has him swearing around another sob.

_‘It’s Sam. Leave a message.’_

Dean lets out another sob and grits his teeth as he tries to find himself some air.

“Listen to me, Sammy. Are you listening? Good, because I just want you to know that I’ll never stop trying to save you. Never! Even...even when you’re a goddamned pain in the ass, you hear me? You’re the only Brother I got, the only thing I--. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep you safe, there’s nothing I wouldn’t. Sammy… I--I lo..I’m sorry.”

The tone beeps at him and he drops his phone and buries his face into his calloused palms.

“Sammy--I’m so fucking sorry.”


	24. Baby and Her Boys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #24 Prompt:** The Impala

On the darkest night of their lives, her headlights pierce through the blackness and shine light on the road ahead of them. She keeps them together, even though the world is trying to tear them apart and she lulls them with the beat of her roaring heart--comforting them with a promise that she’s not gonna quit on them. Not yet, not ever. 

She is made of steel and cloth, and she coddles her broken boys in the backseat. Cracked windows are her lungs, breathing ‘you are safe’ down across their cheeks, and the heat of her engine is the goodnight kisses she leaves against their skin. They ache for their mother and she mourns for them every time they hit a bump, or they open her arm-like doors. 

Her black leather catches their tears as flares of anger burn inside their stomachs. They hate her because she’s just four wheels and black paint, hate her because she’s not a warm bed at the end of the night, because she’s not four walls and a home cooked meal, because she’s not golden hair and sweet perfume, warm apple pies and soft hands. She is everything they don’t want, because she symbolizes everything they lost in the fire. But she is what they need, even if their broken hearts can’t recognize it quite yet. 

They grow together through the years, them in age and her in mileage. She takes them all over the states, never stopping for long before they’re on the road again, roaring down a two-lane backroad with her family tucked tightly against her heart. Because that’s what they become through the years; their initials etched into her wood, the jammed legos in her vents, the forgotten army men in the ashtray, all making it so. She remembers their heartache, their laughter, their song-filled voices crooning out classic rock. She keeps all their memories folded neatly into the seams and folds of her insides. And she knows, even though they never say it, that she is the only place on earth that they’ve come to consider ‘home’. 

She fights alongside them, becoming the getaway car, their armor against a spray of bullets, the steel that bends when she takes a hit to the side for them. She’s come away scratched and at times mangled, comes away limping on a flat tire and a bent rim, comes away with collapsed windows for lungs. Every time she lays down her life for them, to keep them safe--to keep them whole, she never thinks she’ll see that stretch of highway again and her engine wheezes as it coughs on a cloud of smoke. If they’re still breathing, she’ll gladly take her junkyard holiday. 

But they always fix her up, always take their time smoothing out the cracked ribs of her frame, spraying her with new paint at the end--so she’s good as new. They take care of her in the same ways she’s always took care of them. Her horn honks down the first stretch of road after a long holiday, both of her boys in the front seat hooting and hollering, because ‘Baby’s back on the road again.’ 

She watches as death nips at their heels, taking from them slowly and at times--too painfully. Sometimes the interior looks more like a warzone than anything resembling the normal road wear she’s used to. Sometimes she becomes the ambulance, sometimes the ER room, and regretfully--sometimes the hearse. And when it gets really bad, sometimes she becomes their own coffin, cocooning one of her breathless boys closely to her chest as the other mourns silently in the driver’s seat. 

And when those times happen, when she’s only got one of her boys behind the wheel, whether they’ve been separated by choice, by hunt, injury, fight or death--she continues to carry on without fail. Because she knows it’s only gonna be a few thousand miles before she’s got both of them again, safely pressed against her seats. Only a few more hot asphalt days until their knees are knocking against each other when they hit a pothole. Only a few more days till they’re bickering over the radio and fighting over the last bag of funyuns. Because that’s what families do, they always find their way back to each other--always find their way back home. 

She knows that the road only goes so far for them, knows it will end one day. But she guns her engine harder in spite of it, running faster and more defiant with every mile beneath her wheels. Because it’ll end, just how it started so many years ago. With two boys folded together in the backseat, their blood will soak into her leather and her grease will stain their skin--a last embrace. And her headlights will greet the black tar of a different road, where she will carry them for the rest of eternity. 

Because after all, they are as much hers--as she was theirs. 


	25. Eulogy in the Passenger Seat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #25 Prompt:** [Wanderer](http://buticancarryyou.tumblr.com/tagged/wanderer) / [Seeker](http://buticancarryyou.tumblr.com/tagged/seeker) (based off of my inspo tags on tumblr)

One day you’re six years old and pressing your chubby cheek to your big Brother’s chest in the middle of the night, because a bad dream crept under your lashes and left you shaking in your sheets. He doesn’t tell you everything's gonna be okay, because maybe he feels you’re old enough to understand the concepts and rules that make up the dark world around the both of you. Instead he presses his palm to the width of your back and tells you to breathe. In. _Out._ In, deeper still. _Out_ , let it go. And slowly your baby’s breath lungs are mingling with his, every inhale and exhale in sync--lulling both of you back to sleep.

And the next thing you know, you’re scratching eighteen with lanky bones, pressing your sharpening cheek to the cold window of the only home you’ve ever known. Bad dreams still follow you wherever you go, but you’ve stopped crawling into your Brother’s bed at night. Instead you circle your fingers around your throat and squeeze, because the monsters of your childhood nightmares have started to stare back at you in the mirror. You can’t escape them, you can’t run fast enough, because they’re around every bend and embedding themselves under your fingernails. They tint the world around you in red and it’s got you praying for the blackness of unconsciousness.

You wonder when things changed, when true north became something greater than just the brightest star in the sky. Wonder when your tongue started craving for things south, when your chest sprouted teeth as sharp as knives, when loving started to feel a lot more like dying. When did soft cheeks and innocent nights turn into burning skin and an unquenchable thirst for things that were never designed to be yours in the first place? And the more you question, the more you wilt in the passenger seat by his side. He reaches out for you, but you shrink away. He’s gasoline and your chest is a box of explosives.

One day you’re walking towards him, with him, for him, because of him. He is the gravitational force that pins the soles of your galaxy-like feet to the ground. And he tells you sweetly rotten things, confessions of an addict with an undeclared drug of choice. He whispers to you about the riddles of the earth, how to cock a gun, how to wipe all evidence of blood clean, how to keep a poker face when the world thinks you’ve got a losing hand. He tells you it’s just you and him. You and him against the warring ways of every wicked thing that crawls its way into this world. But he never saw the crooked heart that clawed its way from your chest and bled itself out in his name on the floor at his feet.

And the next thing you know, you’re reaching for the emergency brake with the thought of his sugar death lips against your throat. If you don’t find the nearest exit, you’re gonna steal from the very arms that carried you from the flames so long ago. Because you are the fire, you’ve been burning all of these years; kindling in his palms, coaxed with the sound of your name. And maybe he’s been swallowed up in flames for so long, he can’t even smell the smoke in your hair, can’t even see the ash on your lips. But you know if you stay for too much longer, it’ll be too late and the lick of desire will burn you both down.

One day you’re next to him in the passenger seat and you curl your fingers through the holes in your desperately old jeans. You close your eyes and you pretend your hand is laced around your Brother’s as you open your mouth to speak. It feels like a eulogy, a goodbye note that is written in invisible ink and the night before the both of you stretches endlessly, the moon above threatening to go out forever.

And the next you’re on your own, a coat of dreams hanging from your shoulders. You try to tell yourself that they’re not all in his name, try to tell yourself that you’re saving him by walking into the blackness of your nightmares alone. You try to tell yourself that you don’t see the monster in the mirror anymore, that when you wake in the middle of the night you don’t feel that ache in your chest, the one that can only be soothed by his palm against the width of your back. That your breath doesn’t hitch when you try to remember his voice against your ear, telling you to breathe.

_In._

Your heels dig into a beat up mattress.

_Out._

His name tumbles out of your lips as you feel the milkyway carve its way from your pelvis.

_In, deeper still._

You’re so close to the stars dusted against his thighs.

_Out, let it go._

You’re engulfed in flames. 

**

When he finds your body years later, he will weep into the crook of your neck and apologize for the ways he never saw the bruises there. For the ways he never noticed you wilting away, one tear at a time, in the passenger seat. He will kiss your lifeless lips and will you to breathe, just for him--always for him. In. _Out_. In, deeper still. _Out_ , let it go.

And when the night thickens around the both of you, he will call out your name one last time. When it returns back to him, unanswered, he will press his cheek against your rotting chest and lovingly whisper, “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

 


	26. You Are Free

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #26 Prompt:** The Cage
> 
> A/N: WE ARE HALFWAY THROUGH THIS CHALLENGE...CAN YOU BELIEVE!?

The night before Sam falls, Dean holds his Brother close, drawing infinity symbols into his palms.

“We are _forever_ , Sammy.” Dean whispers with meaning against Sam’s ear.

He traces the symbol again, pressing harder so Sam will never forget it. “I’ll always love you; there’s no cage that can keep you except for the one around my heart.”

“Promise?” Sam’s voice cracks with emotion.

“I promise.” And he seals his words with a kiss.

**

_‘As long as he loves me, I’ll always be free.’_

This is the mantra Sam repeats to himself for a seeming millennia underground, while he slowly watches the precious image of his Brother fade from his memory. He presses his thumb into his palm, tries to press the ghost of Dean’s fingers into his frozen skin, tries desperately to make them warm and real, but the harder he presses--the more his own fingers go numb.

Sam watches as Dean’s freckles go first, disappearing one by one like stars in the sky, leaving the world around him even darker than before. Sam tries to remember his favorite ones, the ones he’s traced with fingers and tongue a thousand times, but the more he pulls for them--the farther away they seem. He holds desperately to the last few, watches them flicker and warn him of their impending doom. And when they go, they pop like exploding lightbulbs and make Sam wince mournfully with every sound.

His Brother’s smile goes next, is carved out of his memory tooth by tooth. For a few hundred years he relishes under a jack o'lantern sun, the only reprieve he has from the winter touches of the Hell he’s found himself in. He basks in it, watches as it spreads out like a winding road before him and lets the parts of his soul that can still feel joy, smile back. But when it too goes, washing from Dean’s face like melted wax in the back of his brain, the frigid touch of Hell cocoons him whole.

“As long as he loves me,” Sam whispers into the darkness around him, his throat choking around a sob. “As long as he loves me, I--I..” The mantra skips, his tongue falling limp against his cheek. He curls into himself, winding his arms around the knees he has pulled to his chest. He tries to remember the rest of the mantra, tries to remember the salvation that has kept him whole through all of these years. But the more he tries to squeeze it out, the sharper Lucifer’s blade feels in his ribs.

For thousands of years, Sam watches as the image he swore he’d never forget, fades into nothing more than just a solitary shade of green. And when he starts to feel it fade too, he thinks of spring flowers, of freshly mowed grass, of summer sweet kiwis and four leaf clovers. He thinks of things that the black and white world he exists in has tried to steal from him piece by piece. But it can’t take this color--the window to Dean’s soul, no matter how it tries.

“Forever…” Sam whispers, his voice cracking with lack of use. “No cage, but the one around his heart.”

Dean’s eyes flash behind Sam’s closed ones, startling green like sea foam washing against the shore of his barren soul. Sam hasn’t been touched for what feels like centuries, his skin peeled from his bone and frost hanging from his ribs. The cage has taken everything from him, his body and most of his soul--but try as it might, it can never have their love. Can’t even scratch the surface of their encircling heartbeats, pulsing like a universe between them.

Lucifer screams angrily in the distance and Sam smiles slowly, his lips cracking the ice that holds them closed. And finally the mantra returns, running through his brain like holy water being smeared across his forehead. A baptism of love, in a place light cannot touch.

_‘As long as he loves me, I’ll always be free.’_

Sam’s soul flashes and sparks like Fourth of July fireworks in the depths of Hell’s darkness. He feels for the first time in thousands of years, his soul breaking apart and pulling together.

**

Sam wakes to Dean’s lips against his forehead, his eyes screaming from the brightness of light, of color, of a familiar face drenched in sun kissed freckles looking down at him. When he cries out, a sorrowful sob that is wet with despair and yet filled with relief, Dean’s fingers are at his palm--tracing the infinity symbol he had long ago forgotten.

“I promised.” Dean presses his finger deeper into the soft pad of Sam’s hand.

Sam reaches up for Dean, winding his weed-like arms around his neck and pulling him down and close. He shakes with the force in which he clings, praying his Brother is real and that it’s not just insanity taking hold. Warm lips find themselves against his throat, pressing firmly to soothe the worry in his bones.

“We are forever,” Dean whispers against the wet of his kiss. “Sammy, you are free.”


	27. An Undercover Monstrosity Called Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #27 Prompt:** Undercover

The first time they do it, it’s for the job. Clasped hands that have only seen midnight skies, find ease as they tangle around each other in the midday sun. And the bones of them are both shaking as the most private parts of themselves are put on display for all to see. But it’s not real, it’s not the blatant truth. They can’t hear the panted breaths that escaped their lips after a 3AM motel stop. The ones that sound like, _‘Brother--Brother, please.’_ They see the love, but they don’t see the sin and they both feel like crooks stealing candy heart looks from the peering eyes around them. Because their love looks innocent in this light, but doesn’t resemble anything close to the monstrosity it really is.

The second time they do it, it’s for kicks. _‘They don’t know us; they won’t care.’_ A bold kiss emblazoned on the lips in the bright overlight of a diner in the middle of nowhere. _‘They don’t know we’re Brothers, shh--it’s okay… relax.’_ Trembling fingers, find themselves anchored in the baby soft hairs at the back of each other’s necks. They are safe here, in the abstract world of middle america, where a single soul does not know their real names. Their lips are free to dance, to bite and taste, their fragile hearts on display for all to see. And they stumble at first, fumbling with the idea that their love can exist beyond four motel walls and the churning wheels of the impala.

The third, fourth, and fifth times they do it, it’s by necessity. Their war torn knuckles, bloodied lips and sore muscles ache with every withering mile they go, keeping their raging beast like hearts caged up in their own chests. Closed doors, midnight kisses, and moans that are covered with the palms of their scabbed over hands--both of them too afraid someone will hear, that the monsters they turn into at night will finally be found out. They spend more than half of their lives hiding, denying, fighting the temptation that lives under their fingernails, the one that vibrates under their skins and calls for them to simply touch. And so they calculate their time, wait for the right moment and then let their tangled souls step into broad daylight, where they’ll catch fire and burn alive for all to see.

The last time they do it, it’s with death hanging it’s shadow over the both of them. But instead of pretending to be something they’re not, to save the last shreds of their pride--they lay it all out for anyone to hear. _‘Brother, I have loved you--everyday, in light or darkness.’_ They kiss, without reservation, blood seeping from their bodies and mingling together between them. And in the darkness of night, their final breaths do take flight into the sky. Hand in hand, they smile as they finally step into the blinding light of a new day, where their monster-like love can finally be free.


	28. Blush Stained Sins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #28 Prompt:** Cigarettes

Dean lights up the pitch black room with the flick of his lighter. His hands shake as he inhales a lungful of nicotine. 

The raven sky looms overhead, the milk moon bleeding over his Baby Brother’s skin as his body drowns in a sea of sheets. It’s like a cotton candy dream, with razor blades cutting Dean’s cheeks; a mouthful of blood and a chest full of sin. Desire grows like a weed, winding around his spine and arching like hemlock from his ribs. He burns like a holy ghost in the corner of the room, his bones aching like worn wood. He bites his lip and digs his chewed up nails into his palms. And the pressure builds. And builds. And builds. 

Dean breathes out, sending twirling webs of white sailing into the air before they break apart and disperse. He tries to ignore the pull in his chest, the one that seems to be magnetized to his Brother’s mouth. Tries to not be hyper aware of the glimmer of light that strokes the cupid bow, tries not to feel his own tongue press against the back of his teeth, where it begs for more--always for more. 

He pulls in another round of poison and worries his fingers around his bobbing knees. His hand still shakes when he taps the ashes into the ashtray and he prays the tar will settle into his lungs and cement his feet back into reality. Because he’s been living in this sugar sweet daydream, where ribbons of love swirl around his Brother’s throat. And it’s a nightmare, a crooked sonnet that writes itself between his lashes and pins itself against the blush stain on those innocent cheeks. 

One cigarette becomes two, two becomes four, and four turns into a whole pack. Dean’s throat burns as his fingers reach in for a smoke that isn’t there and his chest stalls when he eyes the mountain of butts in the ashtray. Every one of them looks like a mangled reason as to why his Baby Brother would be better off without him. Because he’s bleeding lovesick poison all over the room and it’s just a matter of time before he’s found out, before those summer sky eyes will turn to him in disgust. And then he thinks, ‘maybe that’d be for the best’; a gun to the heart, just pull the trigger and get it over with. 

Dean watches his Brother’s chest rise and fall, watches it like some watch the sky for shooting stars and realizes that he may not believe in God--but damn does he have Faith. And even though his chest is full of flowered promises, he can’t overlook the fact that he reeks of the most wretched sin, every knob of his spine a declaration of why he could never be deserving of forgiveness. Not for this, never for this. 

So when he reaches for the keys to his car, he tries to be convinced that he’ll come back, that he’s just going to the corner store for another pack of ‘early death’ cigarettes. But when his foot touches the gas pedal, he feels the backs of his eyes well with angry tears. Angry, because the world has always been against him. Taking from him until he has nothing left, but the callouses on his hands. Yet, the one thing he got to keep, he’s done nothing but fuck it up. And betray. 

Nauseated amounts of nicotine flip in his stomach when he’s seventy miles out of town, his eyes blurring the lines of white in front of him. He grips the steering wheel harder and tries to tell himself he’s fine. Tries to shake the vision of his beautiful Brother stretched out on a used motel mattress, tries to ignore the tightening of his jeans when flashes of rose petal nipples flash behind his eyes. But he doesn’t get much farther before he’s pulling over and letting his smoke stained fingers dig themselves under his jeans. The first touch sends lightning bolts down his spine, because he’s been running from this for so long and it feels so good to finally cave into it. His Brother’s smile crawls down his throat and blooms into an arching portrait of the ‘v’ of his Brother’s hips. He digs his fingers into the leather seat and tries to pretend he’s leaving bruises against that taunt throat that’s done nothing but tempt him for months. Because his Baby Brother belongs to him. Just him. Only him. 

When he comes, it’s with his Brother’s name rattling off his tongue like an addict naming their darkest vice and all he can taste is smoke. 


	29. Heart Shaped Monsters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #29 Prompt:** Summertime Sadness
> 
> A/N: This picks up after my previous prompt (Blush Stained Sins), in Sam's POV.

The summer sun is blinding where it slips through the worn holes of a curtain that is probably as old as the window it clings to, tiny pricks of light that flit across the backs of Sam’s eyelids and lull him frustratingly to the surface of consciousness. He twists his body away from the menacing rays and groans when another unruly line of light comes to rest at the corner of his eye. It’s enough to have him reaching for a stray pillow to shove over his face, the strings of sleep still not too far from his eyelashes.

And he’s almost fully relinquished back into the blackness of sleep, when his nose inhales stale cigarette smoke on his pillowcase. It chokes his airway and suffocates the bliss of sleep away from his body.

“Jesus, Dean!” Sam’s chest flares with annoyance as he throws the pillow off his face and chucks it at the bed next to his. “How many times have I told you to smoke outside? It fucking reeks in here.”

He’s rubbing his eyes as he wills the blur of sleep to leave his eyes, so he can continue yelling at his Brother for being an inconsiderate asshole. But then his tongue rolls to the back of his throat as he swallows and it tastes like a goddamned ashtray. If he didn’t know any better he’d swear he was up all night sleep smoking.

When the room comes into focus, the body Sam had expected to be there, is gone. The bed is made, only wrinkled slightly in the middle where Dean had rested after they checked in. A cloak of silence swallows Sam up and he can’t help but feel a note of worry crawl up his spine as he moves his eyes to the table by the window and takes in the crumpled up empty pack of cigarettes and the heaping pile of butts in the ashtray.

Sam’s legs shake with sleep as he stands from his bed and makes his way over to the table where Dean must’ve sat all night. He trails his fingers over the cool surface, purposely lets the pads of them drag through the sprinkled ash around the ashtray. His eyes flit down to the chair next to the table and tries not to notice how it’s turned in a perfect line to his bed. A chill rolls over his shoulders and settles in his gut, turning his empty stomach upside down.

Spinning around, Sam takes in Dean’s bag on the floor at the foot of the bed and takes it as a sign that his Brother means to return. Usually they leave notes, a rule they set up long ago, a measure to ease the constant worry that fills their lives. But the room is bare of Dean’s scrawl, but yet full with something else that’s been unsaid. It’s like a riddle that pierces Sam’s lungs and has him wheezing with what it all means. Because it’s not like Dean to go awol for no reason, that’s usually his own M.O.

Sam crawls over his bed and reaches for his phone on the nightstand, twisting his lower half untill his feet are on the ground and he’s sitting on the edge of the bed. He flips his phone open and presses the number two button until it dials Dean’s number. The phone rings loudly, the tone of it echoing inside Sam’s ribs and as it continues to ring violently into his ear, his lungs deflate even more. Dean’s voicemail finally sounds and Sam’s hands begin to tremble where they’re holding the phone to his ear.

“Pick up, asshole. This isn’t funny.” Sam’s words are less angry and more on the verge of tears.

Hanging up, Sam scoots back against the headboard and pulls his still growing legs up and under his chin, the phone still tangled in his fingers. There’s a lulling dread in his chest that crashes in waves of static against his ribs, it whispers of things he doesn’t want to hear, of things he knows are true, but things that are as rotten as candy apple cores. And as the silence grows around him, the clearer the voice in his head whispers, _‘It’s your fault; it’s always your fault.’_

From there, Sam’s brain rolls out footage from over the last few months, pins it to the exact moment the air around them had changed. When things went from skin deep, to barely hands on. It was so delicate that perhaps neither of them noticed it in the moment, but Sam hasn’t been able to get it out of his brain ever since.

_Flashing images of their hands sprawled palm down on the seat between them, a sharp turn and Dean’s calloused fingers are suddenly tangled in Sam’s. And it feels like a secret blooming in the glowing light from the radio, the midnight sky chasing in front of them like a wild stallion. The kaleidoscope lights from the road dance across both of their faces and for a single solitary moment in time, they are both unafraid to let their truest desire lay bare for the entire world to see. It’s less than a minute, but feels like lifetimes._

_And then, just as fast as it happened, Dean’s hand recoils from Sam’s and finds a white knuckle home around the steering wheel. Sam’s hand moves to his knee, the skin where Dean’s fingers were, burns intensely, as though if Sam looked down he’d see his fingers engulfed in flames. He wants to lick his knuckles, wants to bat the flames with the balm of his saliva, but he’s frozen solid. The greater part of himself hoping that maybe the fire will grow and somehow swallow him whole, so he’d never have to look at his Brother again. Because he should’ve moved his hand first, he should’ve reacted--should’ve, should’ve, should’ve._

_But he didn’t, instead his pounding heart bled all over his sleeve and stained Dean’s fingers in the undeniable color of his freak show love._

Sam digs his fingernails into his kneecaps, digs until he’s got several half moon craters welling with blood. His eyes trail to the empty chair next to the table, the one that sits next to the mountain of smoked cigarettes, and he knows deep down that every strangled butt in that tray is because of him. Because Dean doesn’t know how else to deal with the fact that his Baby Brother might be in love with him. So instead, he’s just trying to smoke himself to death. Or until the haze of smoke is so thick in his lungs, he can suffocate every inch of Sam out of his brain--for good.

The room blurs over, hot tears rolling down Sam’s cheeks, where they then splash down onto his knees. The salt of them burning the places his nails had dug into. And as he cries, he wishes his stupid, wretched heart would just fall out of his chest--because it would hurt less. Finds himself wishing he could go back into time and try not to love his Brother in the fucked up ways that he does. Maybe then, he would have moved his hand and he wouldn’t be stuck in this perpetual summertime sadness. Maybe, his Brother would be fast asleep in the bed next to his and the only problem in their lives would be figuring out where to go next, what kills the monster they’re hunting, and how to stay alive.

An hour later when Dean’s still missing, Sam’s brings the crumpled butt of an old cigarette to his lips. His mouth hollows out, trying to suck in stale nicotine from the spent cigarette, his lips trying hard as his lungs will let him, to taste the leftover smoke or his Brother’s lips. And it’s then that he knows without a doubt, that there’s no maybes in the world that could ever fix the monster his crooked heart has become.


	30. A Chorus of Unsung Songs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #30 Prompt:** Another Tuesday
> 
> A/N: Sorry for the long stint between postings. Minncon happened and then so did post con depression. This prompt goes out to the sassiest mustard I know, Rose. Thanks for putting up with my shenanigans. Sorry I wrote 1.6k when I said I wasn't inspired. Forgive me. <3

When they pass by the first Florida state sign, Sam’s lungs shrivel into the size of raisins. His fingers fidget themselves over his knees, until they settle into balled fists around the fabric of his jeans. He tries to mentally tell himself that he’s just being stupid, that it’s been nearly ten goddamned years since he was anywhere near this god-forsaken, piece-of-shit state and that everything is fine--just fine. But if he has to look over into the driver’s seat just to reassure himself of that, no one would be privy to it, except for himself.

Dean had told him that they’d be in out, that it’d be a piece of cake hunt, that they’d be back home before he knew it--no harm done. The case file was spread out on the table, the news articles of cannibalistic murders all over the Pinecrest, Florida area, highlighting Dean’s sense of urgency. And in response, Sam moaned and groaned, trying to get his way out of it--even tried scouring the internet for a bigger case closer to the bunker, but his results came up empty again and again. Of course when that failed, Sam tried to fake food poisoning, tried for a full eight hours to convince his Brother that they could just call another hunter to take care of it. But eventually Dean called him out on his bullshit, sitting down on the edge of Sam’s bed and gently squeezing his shoulder, knowing without having to hear it, what the huge charade was all about. He was quiet for a second, but then proceeded to tell Sam that it was just a simple Rugaru hunt, that they’d be in and out and on their way back to the bunker in no time.

Less than half a day later they hit the road and Sam’s been taking shallow breaths ever since. His heart squeezing tighter as it sinks further into his pelvis with every city sign they fly by, the map on his phone indicating that Pinecrest is just a breath away from the place-that-shall-not-be-named. The back of his neck breaks into a sweat, his molars worry a nasty sore into the side of his cheek, and his eyes pace endlessly back and forth between the windshield and Dean. As though, if he doesn’t keep an eye on his Brother, he’ll just up and disappear into thin air.

“Quit worryin’,” Dean coaxes, sensing Sam’s growing anxiety in the passenger seat. “It’s fine, Sammy--I promise.”

“I know it’s stupid, Dean. I mean, the practical part of me knows that, but you have to understand what it was like to...to have to live through that. I ca-- I can’t do that ever again.” Sam’s words hang in the air between them and they look just as horrible as they feel to say.

Dean’s hand reaches over and tangles itself effortlessly around Sam’s. Dean’s thumb soothingly makes circles on the back of Sam’s hand, before giving a gentle squeeze. “I know, Sammy. Sorry you had to go through that back then, but you gotta know that was so long ago and I’m here, right here. Nothing’s gonna happen, no funny business.”

“The sooner we can gank this son-of-a-bitch, the sooner we can get out of here.” Sam clings to Dean’s words of encouragement and gives a soft squeeze back to Dean.

**

_‘I never meant to be so bad to you, one thing I said that I would never do….’_

A distant sound, almost song-like hangs in the air as Sam trails behind Dean. Both of their guns are firmly pitted against the palm of their hands, up and pointed, ready for whatever may greet them. There’s a hallway before them and it’s pitch black at the end, but it seems to go on forever. Strange noises sound within the darkness before them and both of their backs stiffen with anticipation.

_‘One thing led to another, we were young, and we would scream together songs unsung.’_

Sam’s chest squeezes tightly as his ears begin to make out the words of a song he swore he never wanted to hear another day in his life. He stops in his tracks, his raised hand falling to his side, finger still on the trigger. He squeezes his eyes tightly shut and tells his mind to knock it the fuck off, there’s no time for this highlight reel through one of the darkest times of his life. And when he finally opens his eyes again, the darkness before him seems even more menacing, the shadow of his Brother’s body barely detectable.

He tries to make a sound to catch Dean’s attention, but Dean just raises his left hand and points him further into the hall. The hunter instinct in Sam has his feet pacing forward again, the claws in his stomach digging deeper with every step he takes. Something from Dean’s left catches his attention and Sam watches as Dean raises his left hand and tells him to hold up, before he disappears from the hallway. Sam’s ribs constrict even tighter as he swears worryingly under his breath, “Just- _in_ -and- _out_ , my ass…”

“Son-of-a-bitch!” Dean shouts loudly, his gun firing off on the tail of his words.

Sam’s spine jolts, his stomach falling straight out of his body as his heart stops beating. “Dean? What--” But his words are cut off from his mouth when he rears around the same corner his Brother had, his feet shuffling on the floor.

To his shock, Dean lies in a heap on the floor, his right hand clutching at his chest. “Dean! Hey?!” He runs forward, his attention solely on his Brother, the rest of the world around him fading into a blur. And as the edges of reality become less and less defined, the clearer in sound that horrible song gets. Sam’s barely got his hands on Dean, barely has got a good look at the damage, when the screeching music gets louder than his eardrums can handle.

_‘'Cause it was the heat of the moment, telling me what your heart meant. The heat of the moment shone in your eyes.’_

Dean’s hand reaches for Sam’s shoulder, his fingers digging bruises, but the music is so loud that Sam can’t even see through the blind panic it’s sent him into. His heart is stalled in his ribs and his arms shake around the heaviness of his Brother’s body, the scent of death is bold and raw around him. He tries to tell himself to breathe, but the more he tries to find focus of his breaths, the more he loses them in the noise of the music. The world in front of him blurs to white and his lungs seize with the mighty swing of desperation.

“No-no..not again--NOT AGAIN!” Are the only words that break free from his lips. He repeats them over and over, repeats them until his tongue feels like cement in his mouth--until he feels his body falling backwards.

The chorus of the song stretches in pitch and slows. ‘ _’Cause it was the heat of the moment, telling me what your heart meant.’_ And with it is an indistinguishable yell that Sam can’t quite make out.

Sam’s head slams against something hard and his eyes slam open, as though they’ve been closed the entire time. The minute they open, the music shuts off and the yell becomes crystal clear.

“Sam-Sammy?!” Dean’s voice is rough and filled with worry. “Hey--hey, there you are...there you are.” Dean’s bruising fingers move from Sam’s shoulder and come to cradle his face, Dean’s calloused fingers sweeping loose hair from Sam’s eyes.

The world around Sam starts to sink in, his bedroom walls surround him, his bedside lamp on and toppled over. His legs are tangled in bed sheets and there’s an undeniable layer of sweat drenching his entire body. And then there’s Dean, alive and well, breathing and looking down at Sam like he always does when the nightmares come back again. There’s sorrow in his eyes, but comfort in his voice when he repeats soothing lines, bringing Sam slowly back to center.

“It was just a dream. I’m here-I’m here.” Dean’s voice lulls, his arms pulling Sam’s body away from the edge of the bed and aligning it next to his. Sam moves easily with Dean’s instruction, laying his head in his Brother’s lap, the heat of tears stinging the back of his eyes. “It’s been awhile since you’ve had one this bad; couldn’t get ya to wake up.”

Sam just clings to Dean’s legs and tries to let the soothing motion of Dean’s fingers smoothing his hair back, pull the rest of the dream off his body. And he wonders quietly to himself if he’ll ever feel safe again, or if his life will always be in shambles--with either reality or dreams trying to take the one thing that has ever mattered to him, away.

“I’ve gotcha...I’ve gotcha..” Dean says over and over. And when Sam starts to cry, Dean doesn’t flinch, just moves his hand to Sam’s back and draws protective sigils. Does it even though they both know the dreams will still come, knows that if it’s not this one, then it will be The Cage. Or a burning ceiling. Or angelic possession. Or any other number of things that have haunted Sam’s dreams over the years.

Sam focuses on Dean’s voice, on the delicate movement of his fingers at his back, hoping and praying that when his eyes do close again--it’ll be those things that will carry him through the fire of his mind. That they’ll plant him safely on the other side of it all, and finally let his weary mind find some much needed peace.

 


	31. Growing Pains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #31 Prompt:** First Kiss

Sam’s fourteen and nursing a forty-mile hard on because Dean’s mouth is wrapped around a bomb pop. It’s red, white, and blue torture; Sam’s cheeks are burning pink and it only makes him take notice of the restriction of his throbbing dick a little more with every mile the impala consumes. He’s fourteen and losing his fucking mind with the slurp and pull of Dean’s lips as it expands and hollows out. Fourteen and minutes from death because Dean’s tongue is the enchanting tune that makes his flagpole heart hoist that sinning desire higher into his throat. Fourteen and kissing the back of his hand in a dirty rest stop bathroom, the other hand jerking his dick in his Brother’s honor. He’s wheezing out Dean’s name against cold graffitied cement when he finally comes all over the place. It’s messy, sticky and has him weak as fuck in the knees.

He’s fifteen and leaving come loads all over the northern half of the US, every single one of them painted in that crooked color of wrong, wrong, wrong. Fifteen and squeezing his legs together in the front seat when he feels his dick stir with interest. Fifteen and getting turned on by every little thing Dean does, things like sticking in an over used mixtape into the tape deck, flicking the lid of his lighter, of stretching back and exposing the dip of his jeans, of everything-- _everything_. Fifteen and making holidays out of the thickness of Big Brother’s fingers, wondering how’d they feel if they pressed into him and scissored him open. Fifteen and excusing himself to the bathroom because he just can’t keep his hands off his body anymore. Someone’s gotta put him out of his misery; fifteen and he’s batting the flames by himself.

Sixteen arrives in the heat of Spring and leaves him breathless in worn hotel sheets. There’s nothing sweet about it, nothing like vanilla frosting smeared across his bitten raw lips. Instead, he’s knocking out the bedside lamp like most blowout candles, his hair slicked across his face with the sweat of another’s body over him. She’s seventeen and looks like a teenage visage, blonde hair and perky, blooming tits. She smells like strawberries and bubbly champagne, smells like betrayal for days under his nails. He fucks her into the mattress and bites back the name that claws up the back of his throat, swallows it down and sinks his teeth against her throat. He leaves ropes of white all over her stomach, the image of freckles and green eyes flashing behind his eyes. He’s sixteen and crying himself to sleep, the smell of strawberries all around him, nauseating him to the bone.

He’s seventeen and looming over Dean like a tree, his branch-like arms growing only in one direction and the root of his heart tangling itself tighter around the only name that could make it continue to beat. He’s seventeen and has been dying for years in the passenger seat, sometimes he has to pinch his own skin to prove he’s still alive--because what if he’s a ghost? What if he died years ago and Dean can’t even see the crooked vine that is growing out of the other side of his car? But then Dean says his name and brings him back to his body, the one that still aches with every minute more he tries to deny it of what it truly wants. He’s seventeen and plotting his getaway, because one day the monster inside of him will eat its way out and consume everything he’s always loved. He’s seventeen and toying with suicide and running away, because his heart just isn’t as strong as he once believed--it will ruin everything one day if he lets it continue to beat.

Eighteen comes the summer before the bus does. He’s eighteen and can taste freedom and relief on his tongue for the first time in all of his life. Eighteen and spending a long June and July in silence, because Dean found his suicide letter and an acceptance letter tucked neatly into the front of his duffle bag. Eighteen and attending his own funeral, a big black car rolling down a two-lane highway towards another nameless town. He’s wearing all black and pulling at the rips in his jeans when the car stops for the last time with him in it. He’s eighteen and cataloging every love poem and breakup song he can think of, making mental folders in his heart, scrawling Dean’s name over every single one of them. He’s eighteen and counting his breaths as his fingers curl around the door handle, eighteen and checking one last time--looking for any mirrored feelings. Eighteen and looking for a reason to stay, when everything in his body has already signed his death certificate. And just when he’s about to file it, making it official, Dean’s lips crash into his. It’s not a bartering type of kiss, not the kind of heated press that he always imagined when he was fourteen, no--it’s simple and unassuming. It tastes like mint chapstick and root beer, feels like goodbye and reads like I love you.

Sam’s eighteen and crying something violent in the back of a bus headed for California, the taste of home still wet across his lips. He’s eighteen and leaving everything he’s always known, because his heart beats sideways. Eighteen and questioning his entire life, the heat of Dean’s lips still burning against his own--because what if Dean’s heart has always beat sideways, too?


	32. Blood On The Hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #32 Prompt:** Wildcard (Author's choice)
> 
> A/N: This prompt is largely inspired by the song, Kitchen Sink by Twenty One Pilots. Also, I wrote this in a certain POV, but upon rereading I realized it ended up being almost ambiguous. So, therefore, I will leave it up to you to decide which POV you see. Which is interesting to me, because at the end of the day, both of our boys are the 'kitchen sink' for the other.

It begins with blood on his hands.

There’s smoke in the distance and it’s ascending towards the sky; it looks like a dream from the edge of the road. A blink of his eyes and two trembling knees later, the smell of death sneaks through the door of his mouth. With it comes a lungful of ash and a sharp thunderbolt of heartache, one that scribbles itself in cursive letters and screams with remorse. Flashing images of happiness smear into an awful scream, the hue of red drips from the ceiling and it matches the sirens lighting up the night. There’s an imaginary noose hanging mid-air, it sings of choking release and it’s impossible for him to ignore. It’s midnight and the night is dark enough that it could swallow the entire scene if it wanted to (him included)--if it was hungry enough.

But it could never lick away the blood from his hands.

It’s a faucet drip, a clink-clink-clink that stirs his charley-horsed mind again. It rhymes with the tick-tick-tick on the wall and marches offbeat to the thrum-thrum-thrum of his own heart. Together it all sounds like a car engine cranking itself over and over again, looking for life--for purpose. It’s like he’s looking at a picture and trying to identify the one thing that gives it life, gives it color and meaning. What is there to see, when every inch of film is covered with tragedy? What’s the reasoning in that? In bloodied prints, pointing the finger of blame directly back at him? It’s a puzzle, but a single piece doesn’t fit. There’s a hole where his heart should be and it feels like a black hole, feels like it’s just as endless as the sky. But even the sky has stars, the sun and a promise of a new day.

Yet the ghost of red is too deeply stained into his fabric.

The tide of grief rides the balance beam of mortality within him. Some days he writes in angry lines, begging for innocence, for white daisies, for second chances. Some days he’s writing apology letters, some others--he’s flirting with eulogies. It’s a broken record that’s on repeat and burning holes into his soul. It’s a reflection staring back at him and smiling even though his tongue can still taste smoke. It’s lying awake at night and waiting for the fire alarm to sound, but it never comes. It’s drowning quietly, too afraid to seek a lifeboat, because somehow things beyond his control have convinced him that he doesn’t deserve to be saved. Not even from himself.

Because he could scrub his hands raw, but they’ll never be clean.

Years pass, some are more memorable than others, some are completely detuned and unrecognizable. There’s a stint of time that is hidden, like a bermuda triangle within himself. Things get lost there, things like memories, ones that disappear and are never seen again. It’s a tiptoe act, a one legged ballet dance around the edges and his stomach always feels like he’s free falling. But he holds on, a white knuckled grip on the page of the book in front of him. Avoid the sinkhole and stay alive, they become rules--they become truths.

It ends the same way it began, with blood on the hands.

The stench of gasoline covers his jeans and the leaves of his lungs shake with the heavy weighted pull of panic. If he looks hard enough, there’s suspended smoke in the distance and it’s still reaching towards the sky. He wonders how long he’s been looking at the same scene, wonders how long his compass has been pointed at the nightmare he’s been running from his entire life. Wonders if he’s been stuck within the black hole within himself, living in the shell where his heart is supposed to beat. The backs of hands are aged, the palms worn and his pads thick with years of stories that live untold. But he builds a confessional between his knuckles, prays for absolution as he picks at the scabbed over wounds, trying to decipher where his blood ends and another’s begins. Trying to find reason within the ache of his clenched fist, as it balances on the edge of a kitchen sink.

Another set of hands lifts his own and brings them to the water.

It’s a tap water baptism; the cool water kissing the sin away from his skin. It’s a holy communion in the middle of nowhere America. His iron fists are being pulled apart by gentle hands, encouraging him to let go of the tragedies he’s carried throughout all of the years. They clank against the bottom of the sink, sounding like bricks of stone, and he feels the heated burn of tears sting the back of his eyes. A voice tells him to let it go and he looks at that curling smoke in the distance, watches as it dissipates and clears from the sky. From the edge of the road, he can finally see the puzzle piece he’s been looking for all these years. It comes in the form of a hopeful smile, one that strips the bolts and chains from around his throat. For he realizes, the sun never resided in the sky, it was by his side the entire time.

His own lips rise, because the blood on his hands finally runs down the drain--this time for good.


	33. The Heart Between

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #33 Prompt:** Threesome

Sam’s hand comes alive at midnight, fingertips slowly trailing over his ribs and coming to rest momentarily on his stomach, feeling the lift and fall of his sleep-like breaths. He wonders if Dean breathes the same way, wonders if their inhales and exhales would be in sync. And then he moves his hand further south, lets the pads of his fingers feel the band of his boxers. He swallows his way through the guilty feeling pulling in his throat, tries to scratch out the billboards that the back of his mind have painted so boldly for him--the ones that read, ‘DON’T DO IT’. Part of him knows he should heed the warning, but the other part of him hopes God’s light can’t see in the darkness of the room. That the sin he’s about to commit will be unseen, even though he’s begging for forgiveness when his bony fingers break pass the tension at the top of his boxers.

Dean is lightly snoring on the bed across from him as the palm of Sam’s hand runs over his already half hard dick, a wave of chills falling over his body. He thinks of his Brother’s cocky smile, his eyes focusing on the fullness of Dean’s lips. They deserve to be on display in an art gallery; they drive him simultaneously insane and further into the hell hole that he’s found himself in since puberty hit some odd years ago. Life simply isn’t easy when everything inside of you is magnetized by the one person it should never be pulled towards.

Sam tugs softly at the head of his cock and sucks his bottom lip between his teeth, the echo of his Brother’s earlier masturbation session still ringing between his ears. Dean, who always tries to keep it quiet. And honestly, if Sam’s ears weren’t so hyperfocused on the soft whine of the mattress when Dean’s hips involuntarily buck up--he’d never even know that his Brother jerked off with him in the same room at all. But where Dean is meticulously quiet, Sam has a harder time controlling himself, finds himself shoving his forearm against his mouth to keep his panting at bay. His arm burning and on fire with the bruising bite marks he’ll leave on himself, ones that he’ll hide for days under long sleeves and hoodies--even if it’s a hundred degrees outside and there’s no A/C. Dean’ll call him an idiot and he’ll try not to think about how hard he came with Dean’s name on his bruised lips.

Dean’s bed moans as he turns, Sam’s fingers stilling where they cup his balls, everything inside of him on high alert and waiting for Dean’s heaving breathing to even out again. Because Dean can never know about Sam’s midnight secrets, can never know about the growing third party in the room between them. So Sam waits, his fingers slowly moving in a stroking motion along the underside of himself. His fingers ache with want, because they need to attend to the desperation that is boiling under his summer-tanned skin, but if life has taught him anything at all--it’s that patience is a virtue.

When the silent room is once again filled with Dean’s sleep sounds, Sam begins to move again, his fingers feverishly clawing around the thickness of his dick, giving it a encouraging pull. All of his organs charley-horsing themselves on the sensation that is the most private parts of him singing out in his Brother’s name. Sam who lists the world wonders in order, all beginning with the night sky that decorates the bridge of Dean’s nose. From there he lists the green of Dean’s eyes, the sharpness of his collarbone and how it contrasts with the thickening of his shoulders, the way he laughs, the way his eyelashes curl towards the sun, the soft bow of his legs. Sam could write a goddamned bible on every inch of his Brother, could also write eulogies for every part of himself that was killed in the process.

He turns his head to stare at the back of Dean’s head, his eyes trailing down over the knob of Dean’s spine at the back of his neck, a bow of muscles pulled delicately in the middle of his shoulders. And Sam finds himself reaching out and tracing the hills and valleys of skin, muscle and bone, his hips bucking up into his fist. He traces delicately and imagines the warmth of skin, the vibration of life and a steady pulse. A moan escapes his lips and it has his fingers swinging up to his mouth mid-trace. _God he’s close, so fucking close_.

He’s pretend kissing the back of his hand, wishing it was Dean’s pout more than anything, when he feels his stomach tighten with the violent onslaught of orgasm. His hand gets messy with its strokes, the sounds of skin slapping, filling the room--but he’s so close he can’t be bothered to care about how loud he’s being. His tongue licks a trail of spit against his knuckles before his teeth sink into a bite, the back of his throat coughing out a name that should never be on his tongue in such a sinful way. And it’s there, with his Brother’s name choking him to death, because he fights it down as it tries to claw its way out, that his balls pull up and his body clenches as the first wave of orgasm hits him. His cock aches as it pumps out sticky ropes of white and just when he thinks it’s over, he starts coming again. He comes so hard, the backs of his eyes white out and he leaves his body.

Moments later, when he takes in another breath, his pulse hammering in his throat--he feels weightless and empty. He looks over at the back of Dean’s body once again, a grimace breaking across his lips as he whispers, “I’m sorry.” Because they’re supposed to be Brothers, but Sam’s heart has outgrown his body and beats in a shade of ‘love’ between them. A color that is hard on the eyes and bitter to the taste. It was only ever supposed to be the two of them, but with Sam’s love, it makes three.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, tugging on the fishing line of his heart, reeling it back from where it hovers over his Brother. It resists at first, but eventually it comes back to him, where he can finally lock it away for the night. But he knows that one day it’ll be too big, too strong for him to tame. Knows one day it will live and breathe on its own, that it’ll need his Brother more than it ever needed him in the first place.

Knows that one day it will eat one of them alive, if not both.


	34. Sorry Hearts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #34 Prompt:** First and last words 
> 
> **A/N:** Suicidal thoughts and everything that goes with that. Just a little heads up in case that isn't your jam.

_I want to die._ The letters are ink heavy and undeniable.

Dean’s eyes pinch themselves shut and then slowly open again, letting them refocus on the black letters scribbled in his Brother’s handwriting. It’s the first thing in the journal, written in the middle of the first page, and smeared at the end of the ‘e’. Dean stares at the words for a long time, wondering if he should flip the page, wondering if he can stomach the contents of what is written within the pages of the worn and bound book. It hadn’t been his intent to read it, but it’s haunted him for miles, the back of his spine itching with a growing curiosity. He’d managed three weeks, two hunts, and a one night stand before he found himself through half a bottle of Jack and his calloused fingers aching around the cover of all of Sam’s secrets.

He presses the pad of his thumb to the indentation of the word ‘die’ and winces at how hard it digs into the page. It could be carved there, could be sewn into the fibers and burned into the grain. There’s meaning in how it’s written and it has Dean reaching for the bottle of whiskey, needing the amber liquid to quell the rising tide of panic in his chest. The burn of alcohol sits in his stomach as he searches the edges of the page for a date, only to find his finger pressing harder into the page when it comes up dateless. There’s no telling how long ago Sam wrote these words. It could be years ago, it could be months and the gap between the two does nothing but nauseate him further.

Finally, Dean works his fingers along the edge of the pages and flips a few deeper into the journal.

_The sun exposes me, cruel and burning. I cannot hide under her light, though my shadow does try. It chases ‘round me and always ends up standing next to you. You--who haunts me, who has me praying for powers that are unseen. You--who swallows me up in flames and has me burning from the inside. Please, let me sleep. Let me rest; give my aching heart a home._

Dean’s eyes dip below the words and sees a single heart, half drawn and messy. One side is perfectly drawn and the other is fading, as though the ink of Sam’s pen was giving out. Or maybe it’s meant to be that way; he’s not sure anymore. Not about this, not about anything.

Another swig of the bottle, and a few pages deeper, he keeps reading the unspoken words of his Brother’s heart.

 _What if? It could be me. It could. Why don’t you see? Why don’t you ever see?_ The question mark turns into a line that continues down the rest of the page. When it stops, the question mark turns into an ‘m’ and continues to spell out the word, _Me?_ The word is retraced several times and circled by hasty rounds of Sam’s pen. As though he was screaming onto the page, as though he wanted the words to come to life--to breathe and feel as deeply as he had. The words echo between the lines and Dean gets caught up in the net of them, wondering just who would have provoked this angsting rage out of his Brother.

Towards the back of the journal, there are several blank pages, followed by a picture of their parents jammed tightly into the binding. Dean looks at it and lets his thumb slide over the blonde image of his mother, his heart sinking in his chest at the memory of her perfume. It’s faded with the years, nothing more than a delicate smell in his mind, one only he could pick out and know like the back of his hand. He replaces the picture and flips a few more pages, only to stumble upon a picture of him and Sam. It’s from years ago, but it’s a good one nonetheless. His arm is swung around Sam’s shoulder, his Brother fitting tightly against his side and they’re smiling and happy. Dean sees his arm from the side of the picture and remembers the old disposable cameras Sam used to love to lug around. Sam, who loved to collect photographic proof that they existed, that their lives through the backroads of America were not just campfire ghost stories. That the broken glass in a random bathroom mirror and the spring flowers blooming through the cracks of cement--existed, just like the both of them.

He finishes off the bottle of liquor and then puts the picture of the two of them on the table in front of him. He lets his eyes absorb the faded color, lets his mind wander back to that random day in god knows where, in some miscellaneous diner and he wishes he could have those moments back. Those tiny, fragile and innocent moments. The ones that were escaping him faster than he could have ever known, because now here he is and Sam is halfway across the country--trying to lead the type of life where pictures have frames and shelves. Where life is safe and reliable, where that troubled mind of his could busy itself with geek things like Philosophy and Law.

Dean flips to the last page and cards his fingers over his face as he takes in the tiny print that is filling the page. It looks like a whispered confession, the print so small and hard to read, but it covers every inch of the white paper, making it look like blue ink sea drowning any ounce of land to be seen. He finds himself staring like a sailor caught in a storm and his heart is on the line, snagging over words that jump from the page.

_I’ve tried. God, I’ve fucking tried. I’ve spent three-hundred and sixty-five days writing in this thing, trying to change my mind, trying to dig this thing out of my chest and force it to behave. But I’ve run out of pages, out of time, out of fake promises to tell myself. And I look at you and I know that there could never be enough of any of these things, how could there be? To love you is a death wish. Craving your lips, like your feet crave the press of the accelerator pedal. Riding shotgun, living life as a lie, consuming your sin in chameleon colors--trying to cover the stain of aching apologies. It’s not your fault. Not your fault. No. It’s only mine. I am the broken one, with all the crooked smiles and barbed wire love poems. I wanted to die, some days the jury is still out, but the verdict always reads the same--’he’d never forgive you if you did it.’ And you wouldn’t, you would never forgive me and you’d never forgive yourself. You’d blame yourself for it, because that’s who you are. And rest, this criminal soul would never find. For I’m guilty in love, guilty in death. Guilty, guilty, guilty. You’ll blame yourself for California, too. You’ll bury yourself in cases, in alcohol, in nameless lays between the miles--you’ll try to punish yourself for not making me stay. But by letting me go, I’ll learn to live again. Let me go, please--let me go. Someday you’ll forgive me and somehow that makes these words easier to say…_

Dean feels like his insides have spilled out of his body, like his flesh is a casket to this newfound world he never knew was on the horizon. His fingers tremble as he traces the color on the page, the bold ink splotching and bleeding in places, and wishes he could still feel the heat of Sam’s palm as he wrote these words. He wants to turn the page and see what is written on the back cover, but he also wants to find the nearest toilet and rid his body of the contents of the empty liquor bottle and cheap burger and fries he ate an hour earlier. The room is spinning around him and maybe it’s Sam’s words or maybe it’s the whiskey--he can’t tell anymore.

He rereads the words in front of him and then holds his breath as he lets himself finally see the last words Sam wrote for him.

_I’m in love with you. I’m sorry, Dean._

Dean lets a mangled out sob escape his lips, it’s raw and violent. His tears turning into hurricanes as he swims across the words again, sinking deeper to the last string of words a little further down the page.

_I’m so fucking sorry._


	35. Mirrored Skulls & Ribboned Bellyaches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Weekly Prompt #35:** Four words: bellyache, ribbon, skull, mirror

“Please,” A man begs and it sounds like a prayer. “I’ll give you whatever you want. I swear! I, uh--I just please-- _please_.”

“Yes,” Sam says lethally. “You _will_ give me whatever I want.” His eyes narrow as his tongue dots his sentence with finality.

“No! Please!”

It starts as a bellyache of butterflies against the back of his spine and then lifts up through his chest, clawing like a devil against his ribs. And when hits the back of his throat, Sam’s mouth pulls back into an ugly sneer as the monster in his veins finally takes a hit of oxygen. He’s been fighting it for years, been burying his inner demons under the rug of his lashes for so long, but it screams too loud and his shaking hands just can’t choke it to sleep anymore.

Sam grabs a fistful of curly brown hair and lifts the man from the base of his skull, lifts him until they’re eye to eye and Sam can clearly see the fear italicizing itself in the man’s pitch black pupils. Looks until he can see his own reflection staring back at him, looks until he can see what no mirror has been able to show him. And when he sees the beast inside of himself unveil itself fully, he drags his knife across the man’s neck swiftly. Blood spews from the cut and the man begins to gargle on his own life, his own body betraying the life source that now evacuates from it.

“‘M gonna have what I want,” Sam whispers as he feels a drop of blood roll down his cheek.

The man’s eyes flash from fear to terror as the realization of death finds itself inside of his chest. Sam watches as he struggles, feels the man’s hands claw at his own throat, feels as the hair in his fist starts to pull from the man’s scalp. He laughs then because the thrill of the kill is flying up the back of his spine like a ribbon of lightning bolts in the night sky. And when the electricity of it hits his arms, he digs his knife into the man’s stomach, ripping his gut wide open. The man tries to scream, but he just chokes on more of his own blood, his terrified heart pumping blood faster and faster, expediting his own end.

Sam drops the man and watches how the color red pools onto the floor, thinks for a second that it looks like a tipped over can of paint, but one inhale tells him that this scarlet letter was never meant to decorate the walls. His eyes trace the edges where it smears, noticing how it seems to concentrate around the man’s body like a halo. And his silver knife glints in the overhead light, a crooked smile echoing alongside it, with nothing but violence written on his cracked lips.

Murder hangs in the air and it dances with the beast of Sam’s heart in the middle of the room. It’s a living nightmare, but it feels like goddamned dream. He looks from the body to the backs of his hands, taking note of how they shake with the surging levels of serotonin hitting his system. And when the man’s body exhales one last time, Sam takes a deep breath in and swears that he’s never felt more alive.

It’s not until he feels a hand splay itself around his shoulder, giving him a squeeze, that his feet hit the ground again. Sam looks over his shoulder to see Dean smiling at the corpse on the floor.

“Good boy,” Dean says with a smile written in his tone, his eyes admiring the sight of stolen life littered before them. “But what do you say? Now that you’ve gotten what you wanted, how about I get what _I_ want?”

Sam turns around and cards a bloodied palm across Dean’s cheek and through the fine hairs that litter the space around the nape of Dean’s neck. “But I want that, too…”

“So you want your cake and you want to eat it too?” Dean cocks his eyebrow teasingly, before turning around with a wink. “Well, you better come and get it then.”

Sam doesn’t argue.


	36. Rainy Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Weekly Prompt #36:** A day off

Sam wakes to the slow tap of fall rain against the window, the room around him is cloaked in darkness, even though the alarm clock reads that it’s well past noon. He’s mid-stretch when he realizes that the space beside him is empty, his ears focusing intently for the sounds of his Brother, only to come up silent. His eyes are fully open as he sits up, carding the sheets from his body, as he scans the room around him for confirmation of Dean’s absence.

After a morning piss and shower, he finds himself peeking through the curtains to the outside world, his eyes looking for the black metal that should be there, but isn’t. He then reaches for his cell on the table and pulls up Dean’s number, pressing dial without another thought. Only a few rings go by before it’s answered.

“Sammy Boy!” Dean greets. “‘Bout time you got your lazy butt outta bed.”

Sam grunts annoyingly. “You could have woke me.”

“Could’ve, but I didn’t.” Dean’s voice is a smile through the receiver. “I figured I’d grab us some food and something to drink, ya hungry?”

“Starving…” Sam says, placing his palm flat on his growling stomach. “Where are you?”

“Look outside.”

Sam looks through the window again and sees the impala roaring into the parking lot. When Dean parks her in front of their room, he waves and then hangs up. Sam opens the door just in time for Dean to sail quickly through the doorway, a paper bag and a case of beer in hand, his hair dripping rain down the sides of his face. The smell of wet leather permeates through the room, followed by the promises of greasy diner food and it makes Sam’s insides swell with happiness.

Dean shrinks out of his jacket and throws it on a chair, his feet kicking themselves out of his boots as he opens up the paper bag and pulls out two styrofoam containers. He hands one to Sam and smiles warmly, putting the other down in front of himself. They open their lids simultaneously, and Sam finds himself staring down at a grilled cheese sandwich, a cup of tomato soup and a side salad. Dean groans over his burger and chili covered fries, swiping a few into his mouth without waiting for the plastic fork that his other hand reaches for at the bottom of the bag.

“I figured,” Dean chews and talks at the same time. “We’d take the day off, eat some greasy food, watch some movies, play some cards--or whatever else comes to mind.” He finishes the end of his sentence with a devilish wink.

“Yea, you figured.” Sam retorts sarcastically, pouring ranch dressing over his salad.

“Oh, don’t play hard to get, Sammy.” Dean’s eyes turn into slits, reading of what exactly he has in mind. “We both know how you like to give it up.”

“Are you calling me…” Sam scoffs as he takes a pull of the beer Dean hands him. “A slut?” His eyes bat innocently as he presses his free hand against his chest. “I can’t believe you would…”

“I’m calling you a goddamned menace!” Dean corrects, pointing his finger in the air at Sam and makes exaggerative circles around Sam’s face.

“Yea, as if I’m the bastard that can’t keep his hands to himself.” Sam tears his crust off his sandwich and tosses it into the empty lid.

Dean smiles around his burger and then takes a bite, he puts it back down and reaches back into the paper bag.

“Maybe these will help,” Dean says simply as he chucks a little plastic bag at Sam.

Sam catches it on instinct and screws his eyes up at Dean with questions. “What is this?”

“You tell me!” Dean says reaching for his beer and giving Sam a pointed look.

Sam opens the bag carefully and laughs when he lifts up a pair of fuzzy, pink handcuffs. His laugh deepens as his head falls back and he roars out even louder.

“So, yea... “ Dean continues. “Like I was saying, ‘or whatever else comes to mind.’”

“You’re gonna regret this,” Sam says putting the handcuffs on the table next to his box of food, his forefinger running over the soft material.

“Good,” Dean says with a smile lighting up his face.

“That’s what you say now.”

“Oh, Sammy, I like it when you talk all dirty to me.”

“Shut up.”

“Finish your food, Samantha.”

“I hate you.” Sam curses.

“You love me,” Dean says slowly.

Sam sighs and kicks Dean’s shin under the table. “Lucky for you then.”

“Am I gonna get lucky later?” Dean’s mouth falls open obnoxiously, his half chewed food on display for the whole world to see.

“Maybe…” Sam huffs out and makes a disgusted face at Dean’s poor table manners.

“Man, I love days off.” Dean laughs to himself as he starts chewing his food again and then leans back in his chair.

Sam smiles at his Brother’s childlike humor, “Jerk.”

“Bitch.”


	37. A Push Pin Kind of Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #37 Prompt:** Maps

Their love flows like the 101 that curves up and down the west coast, hugging tight to the shore but always longing to overflow like the sea. It’s rocky at points before it smooths itself into white sandy beaches and hotel California sunsets. The sun kisses their cheeks, their tongues carving out memories into the hillside of each other’s throats. And then when the night comes, the moon follows their taillights and sings a lullaby of sins against the windshield. They try to speed up, try to gun the engine full throttle and beat the growing pulse in their veins. But they’re as helpless as a pebble at the bottom of the ocean floor, the tide is too strong and it pushes them deeper and deeper still. Has them spiraling and somersaulting, catching each other in the nets of each other’s arms--clawing for the surface, for the relief. And when they break it, they both breathe for the first time in days.

It grows like the wildflowers that bloom in the plains of the mid-west, stubbornly and weed-like. It fills up the barren land inside of their chests, and colors their secret lover cheeks. Their fingers fold like hilltops rolling into the valleys, tangling together like storm clouds in a summer sky. It has their heartbeats hitching like thunder, their lightning bolt mouths hanging open and craving the taste of fresh rain. They paint romance in the color of sin across the endless miles of wheat, finding hidden shoulders on the road, just like they find keepsake kisses in each other’s shirt pockets. They eat them up like they’re starving, like addicts buzzing for another hit. The sun is hot and menacing on the backs of their necks as they whisper a litany of stop signs against each other’s skins. But the brake lines of their hearts have been cut and they’re speeding across the state lines of each other’s mouths. And they don’t care, don’t care, don’t care.

They make promises to each other in the cool mountains, they bleed them out on the backs of busted knuckles and bloodied lips. A need in their hips erects itself like a church and they say their vows in the low light of another vacant house that whines at the rustling wind of their heavy weighted secrets. They’re grave diggers, naming their deathbeds at the backs of each other’s knees, tracing scattered eulogies along their mile marker spines. They make homes out of each other’s mouths, hanging arching collarbones at the door and declaring them wonders of the only world they’ve ever known. They write their initials on the other’s wrist and swear that as long as they’re together, they’ll never be lost.

Their love outstretches any map, overwhelms any border and crosses every sea. It reaches upwards to the sky, becomes the stars, the planets, and other nameless galaxies. It delves into the pits of this earth and survives the cruelest fires any soul could ever come to know. It’s unparalleled and undefinable, it is in the smallest grain of sand and in the tallest hilltop. It is in the gentle breeze that comes in through the cracked windows and in every single color that comes alive all around them (and within them).

Their love is everywhere, everywhere.

And it continues to blaze across every stretch of land like a comet on four wheels, destined to one day leave its mark in the history books.


	38. Ain't Afraid Of Ghosts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #38 Prompt:** Trick or Treat

Exactly two days before Halloween, Dean barges through Sam’s bedroom door and excitedly suggests that they should take the holiday off and celebrate it properly for once. And when Dean is done pitching his suggestion, Sam has to literally focus on not rolling his eyes into the back of his head, because Halloween is stupid and it always has been. He’s got his mouth halfway open with an argument, when Dean smiles wholeheartedly at him and it paralyzes his complaints in their tracks.

“Fine,” Sam plays into Dean’s suggestion. “But there’s no way in _hell_ you’re getting me to dress up, just so we’re clear.” Sam looks Dean squarely in the eyes and tries to cement his words into the back of Dean’s head, hoping that they stick.

“Whatever, we’ll have fun.” Dean replies, smacking Sam on the shoulder as he makes his way back out of Sam’s room, just as abruptly as he had bulldozed into it.

Over the next twenty-four hours, Dean makes himself scarce around the bunker. He disappears for large chunks of time, locking himself in his bedroom and walking back and forth to the garage. Every time Sam looks in his direction, Dean wipes a goofy smile off his face and clears his throat. And Sam just cocks his eyebrow and shakes his head, because whatever Dean is up to--he knows he’s not gonna like it one bit.

\--

“This is ridiculous,” Sam scoffs at his reflection in the mirror, his eyes roaming over the tan jumpsuit he’s wearing. “I specifically told you that I was _not_ going to dress up.”

Dean comes up behind him in a matching tan jumpsuit and winks at Sam in the mirror. “Gotta live a little, Sammy. C’mon, you know it’s funny.”

“It’s dumb.”

“Funny.”

“DUMB.”

Dean jabs Sam in the ribs. “Funny.”

“Whatever.” Sam gives up and swats at Dean’s arm.

\--

An hour later they’re pulling up to a local dive bar and a group of guys outside take the sight of an emblem Dean taped to the doors.

“No way!” They shout drunkenly. “Guys, the Ghostbusters are here!”

Dean’s giggling as he climbs out of the driver’s side, reaching into the back for his makeshift proton backpack, that he made with cardboard, beer cans and duct tape. Sam begrudgingly gets out of the car after him and grabs his own, putting it on when Dean looks over the hood of the car with expectation.

They walk side by side into the bar and Dean shouts immediately, “Who ya gonna call?” And Sam’s cheeks heat up when every single patron turns to look at them.

A beat goes by before the crowd roars back, “Ghostbusters!!!”

\--

Six double shots of tequila later, Sam is hanging off Dean’s shoulder and chanting the theme song at the top of his lungs. “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts!”

And Dean repeats after him, “Ain’t afraid!”

\--

“So, what do you guys do?” A pretty little thing with shoulder length brunette hair, dressed as sailor, asks.

Dean turns to Sam and smiles, before looking back at the woman standing in front of them and answering with, “We hunt ghosts.”

And it’s then, 48 hours after Dean asked him to go out for Halloween in the first place, that Sam finally understands what it’s all for.

For one night of the year, every single person can dress up and pretend to be something they’re not. But for them, it’s the only night they can truly be who they are, who they’ve always been, and who they’ll always be.

 _Hunters_.


	39. Satin Dream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #39 Prompt** : Drunken Cuddles (suggested by: [itsabrilliantnoiseilovethatnoise](http://itsabrilliantnoiseilovethatnoise.tumblr.com))

Sinfully soft bare skin suddenly electrocutes Dean’s senses, jarring his breath, his words, and thoughts all at once. His Baby Brother is crawling up behind him like a wet dream out of some kind of sticky magazine. And there’s not enough amber colored alcohol in the world to drown out the piercing scream of his heart; it howls at the full moon of his Brother’s kneecaps against the backs of his thighs and he feels his stomach twist with a sickly need.

“Just wanted to be pretty for you,” It tumbles from bubble gum pink lips that smell like a booze marinated fantasy. Sam drags his leg up the side of Dean’s, highlighting once again how smooth his bare skin is. “Mmm.” Sam hums approvingly, relishing in the rough feel of Dean’s legs against his own.

“Sammy,” Dean wheezes out, his back arching backwards to press into Sam’s chest, his mind spinning out as he tries to imagine Sam shaving his legs for him. His heart flip flops in the darkness of his ribs as Sam’s delicate ankle bones dig into the backs of his calves. They feel like nails into his coffin, his dick growing impossibly hard by the second.

“You like it?” Sam asks as his hands card themselves under Dean’s t-shirt and roam up his torso. “Like that I’m pretty, just for you?” His thumbs flick over Dean’s nipples, before dragging back down to hover teasingly at the waistband of Dean’s boxers.

Dean curses under his breath and fights every urge in his body to roll over and pin his devilish Baby Brother into the mattress. Because that’s all he wants to do, wants to bite that innocent ivory skin and leave the bruise of his kiss behind. Proof for the world to see that he is his, that this pretty, fox-eyed love song of a Brother--only belongs to him. He trails the sharp canines in his mouth and imagines the heat of Sam’s flesh against them, the taste of iron, like perfume against his buds. And he wants, wants, wants.

But he doesn’t do those things, no, instead he lets Sam’s arms wrap around him and have their way. It’s a thousand deaths with every aching second that clicks by, his brain buzzing in his skull as he waits for that moment when Sam’s bony fingers wrap around the heartbeat between his hips. Sam, who takes his time, knowing well and true that he’s got Dean right where he wants him. Sam, who probably spent all afternoon while Dean was busy, with foam covered legs and a cheap razor. Sam, who took his time even then, weary of nicking his skin, just like he’s nicked his Brother’s heart. Sam, who probably smiled at himself as he ran his own fingers over his wickedly smooth legs, imagining the sounds they’d dig out of Brother’s mouth.

Sam pushes his knee between the back of Dean’s legs, lets Dean feel every inch of his satin skin. Dean’s mouth opens wide and his fingers wind themselves around Sam’s, trying to anchor himself into his body because he’s currently going out of his mind. Sam laughs in little puffs against the back of Dean’s neck, his tongue reaching out and licking a line in the curve of Dean’s shoulder. He lets his line of saliva dry before leaning forward to bite lightly, his lips curving into a smile as he feels Dean’s muscles tense with pleasure beneath him.

“Pls, Sammy…god.” Dean’s begging now, his dick leaving little wet spots where the head of his cock presses against his boxers. His cock twitches, a string of precome trailing down the underside of it, as he moans out his Brother’s name again.

“Look at you,” Sam mutters, his chin digging into Dean’s shoulders as he peers down to look at Dean’s tented boxers. “All hard and coming undone for your sweet, innocent, Baby Brother.”

“Yea, sweet and innocent…” Dean whines. “Try, pain in my fucking ass.”

“You love it,” Sam says moving his leg, so Dean’s attention is brought back to the smooth drag of Sam’s skin. “You love me.”

“I’d love you a lot more if--” Dean whips out with frustration, the alcohol in his system seeming to make everything feel more intense than usual. And he’s about to follow through with his previous wants, about to turn this game on his Brother’s head and take exactly what he needs. Because he can’t wait another second, can’t wait for Sam to put him out of his misery.

“If…” Sam says seductively. “I did this?” Sam’s hand finds itself under the waistband of Dean’s boxers finally, His thumb presses into the slit of Dean’s head and feels the slick of precome well up beneath his touch.

Dean trembles at the touch of Sam’s matchstick fingers, the first touch already lighting the fire of pleasure at the bottom of his spine. “Please…” He begs again, needing more.

“This?” Sam complies, wrapping his fist around Dean’s cock. He pulls up instantly and lets go, feeling the jump of Dean’s dick hungrily seek out his hand. But he doesn’t wait long before he reaches back down and drags his fingers through the mess of precome at Dean’s head. He smears it along Dean’s length and then turns his hand back into a fist and rests it against the top of Dean’s cock.

“Sammy, please.” Dean’s hips buck up, his dick needfully seeking out the sweet pressure of Sam’s hand.

Sam’s hand slides down over Dean’s cock, with more pressure than the first time. It elicits a string of curses from Dean’s mouth as Sam reaches the base and then comes immediately back up and off. He teases Dean like this for a few pulls, before he arches his own hips up and presses the need of his own dick against the curve of Dean’s ass. Dean gasps then, pressing back and Sam’s fingers tremble with the rush of pleasure that races up the back of his legs, sinking into the pit of his stomach.

They move together, Sam’s hand around Dean’s cock, Dean’s hips jerking up and then back to meet the thrust of Sam’s dick. It doesn’t take them long, their whiskey-filled stomachs burning as they race each other to the finish line. Sam finishes first, his hips stuttering against the line of Dean’s ass, the warmth of his come beading through the fabric of his own boxers. His hand is still as he rides the wave of pleasure, but Dean is still fucking up into Sam’s hand, eager to finish. It takes him only a few pumps before his back stiffens with the first ropes of come that paint his chest and Sam’s hand. He moans loudly, the entire room vibrating with his release, as he pants his way through it.

When they both come down, they discard their messy boxers and clean each other up as best as possible without leaving the bed. By the time they both settle back down, they’re both cocooned in a cotton dream, sleep not far from either of them. Sam rests his head against Dean’s chest, Dean idly twirling Sam’s hair through his fingers. And it’s here, in these moments where they can just be each other’s and no one else’s--that make them feel most at home.

Before Sam goes, he hears Dean whisper, “You’re always pretty to me.” It’s followed by the press of soft lips against the top of his head. “Always, always.”


	40. A Poison Paradise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #40 Prompt:** Monster Said So (suggested by: [tipsysam](http://tipsysam.tumblr.com))
> 
> A/N: I listened to [this little cover of Toxic by Yael Naim as I wrote this, give it a listen as you read.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETh0Kfxk2BY) :)

Smoke fills the air when the music hits, white sparkly lights in the shape of a heart twinkle behind a lone chair on the stage. Hungry eyes wait feverishly to be fed and Dean’s tongue is curled up tight in the back of his throat. He’s been here before, but this time is different. This time he’s not looking to escape into perfume and a nicely decorated rack. No, this time is different and every bone in his body is on high alert, his fingers curling anxiously around a glass full of top shelf whiskey. Usually he takes the cheap stuff, but tonight is a special night and he feels like celebrating.

When the first bass note drops, candy apple red high heels appear from under the curtain. They shine like poison, looking for a gullible sucker in the audience to fall victim to their spell. Behind the shoes, follows a death sentence dressed up in fishnets. The first leg goes on forever and when it stops, another hint of lacy red appears through the curtain. And before the room can take another breath, there she is--spinning like a red devil onto the stage and when she stops, the crowd gasps and whistles.

Dean watches the back of her body, watches as every inch of her skin shines like some kind of diamond filled sky. She’s topless and her arms hug herself as her spine curves back and forth, looking like some love goddess who belongs to a lamp--and she’s here to grant everyone their last wish. Her right hand unfurls like a flower, lifting from her body and rolling into the air magically. When it stops, her body shimmy’s downward until she bounces in a crouched position. The sequins that are sewn into the lacy fabric around those hips, hypnotizes the room and causes Dean to stop breathing.

When she finally turns around, Dean’s eyes feast on the heart shaped pasties that sparkle with jewels. They hide those blooming petals from view and Dean’s throat works around a swallow, because suddenly he’s thirsty for other things besides top shelf whiskey. He watches as her long, long legs straddle the chair, his eyes transfixed as she rolls her stomach up, her hands trailing up her ribs and getting lost in her curly, brown hair. Her red painted mouth opens into an ‘o’, and Dean’s falling down her throat, on his way to Neverland. She’s beautiful in the spotlight, moving like some slow motion dream--right out of a magazine. There’s a hundred pairs of eyes on her, but she scans the room and locks onto his. She mouths the words of the song, ‘ _you’re dangerous...i’m l o v i n g it._ ’

Dean feels the razor sharp points of those words, feels them hit his chest like arrows, feels himself bleed out in the middle of the room, feels himself smile despite it, because he’s a fucking masochist. The room around him fades away, and it’s just her and him. The lit up heart behind her, turns to red as her hips move forward and her back arches away from the chair. She spins in her chair until she lands sideways, slides from the seat until her back is on the chair and then she lifts her legs slowly into the air. Dean watches as her red heels dance in the air, watches as his molars ache for just one lick of that sweetness, for the poison that will surely kill him. And his dick nudges itself against the inseam of his pants, agreeing to the terms of death before him.

Her head falls backwards, her hair falling in curls that are a whisper away from touching the floor, her taut throat on display for all to see. It stretches like it should be behind glass in a museum, it shines in the light and sprouts from her collarbones like a gift. And then just as fast, she is up off the chair, her legs twirling her seductively until she drops to her knees at the edge of the stage, where she paints an aching portrait of want with her body.

Dean watches as men at the front of the stage lean forward and throw money at her, some are brave enough to dip their fingers under the band of her lace panties. He watches every foaming-at-the-mouth patron pay their respect, every single one of them boiling a murderous hue of jealousy in his veins. They don’t deserve to touch her, don’t deserve to let their eyes drown in her beauty. Dean shifts in his seat, clearing his throat, trying to keep the growl of his heart from echoing between his lips.

She slithers closer to the edge and winks prettily at one patron who rolls a hundred into her panties, his fingers dragging slowly back out, tracing down her thigh as he sits back down. She blows him a kiss and sits back up, turning her attention back to Dean. Dean who sits with a stiff dick and a raging wave of possessiveness in his chest. She smiles seductively at him as she lifts her body from the floor, her hips rolling like ocean waves, the glimmer of glitter and sequins captivating the crowd once more. She blows him a kiss and a few dozen eyes turn to see where it lands, the heat of blush painting his cheeks with guilt.

Dean swallows, his heart racing in his throat, his palms sweaty and his tongue dragging across the top of his mouth. Watches as she makes a show of circles around the chair before she saunters back to the curtain, where she looks over her shoulder and then disappears as slowly and wickedly as she had appeared. The song ends just as the curtains dance behind her exit, and the crowd erupts and hollers loudly from their seats. Dean sits unmoving, but finishes the rest of his glass of whiskey and then gets up from his seat as the announcer comes on stage.

“Give it up for that red vixen, Carmen!!” The announcer claps with the crowd before adding, “She’s something, ain’t she?”

“Yea..” Dean mumbles to himself as he finds the front exit, his dick still whining in his jeans. And when he gets outside there’s some pretty things eyeing him up and down, asking if they can take care of him, their eyes tracing the outline of his dick. But he pushes by them and heads for his car around the corner.

Twenty minutes later, he’s pushing his little Brother through the motel room door, and ripping his clothes off before the door even clicks behind them. Dean spins them both around and crashes his Baby Brother against the back of the door, because he won’t make it much further. Dean can’t get his jeans down fast enough, his fingers simultaneously trying to push his down and pull down Sam’s sweats. Sam smiles at him devilishly, the stain of red still painting his lips, the tease of glitter still covering his skin. And Dean can’t take it, feels like his skin will melt right off his bones and expose his heart for what it really is, what it’s always been--a monster. But Sam’s grin turns into a full smile and Dean shoves Sam harder against the door, because his heart is hungry and there’s only one taste that can salve it’s growl.

“Did you like her?” Sam whispers, sucking in his bottom lip and biting it questionably, his eyes batting beautifully.

Dean stares at his beautiful Brother and then leans forward to capture his lips, his teeth nipping to bite, his tongue wild for the taste of copper--for the mark that his kiss will leave.

“I loved her.” Dean mumbles against Sam’s jaw, lifting his Brother’s legs to wrap around his hips. “I love you.” Dean pants into Sam’s collarbone, his lips dragging achingly against the heart shaped glitter that’s still there.

Sam cries out when Dean finally pushes in with nothing but spit slicking his way. It’s a little too fast, too rough--but Sam’s nails claw at Dean’s back and urge him further in, welcoming the monster inside of him to feast heartily. And Dean’s heart swallows as much as it can, claiming every inch of the Brother it adores.

Later, when Sam asks if Dean will always loves him, Dean will kiss his Brother’s swollen lips and drag Sam’s hand over his own heart as he whispers, “Yes, because the monster of my heart says so.”


	41. Winchester Alphabet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week #41 Prompt:** Letters

_‘A’_ is for those **August** nights when it’s just the two of us. When the sky holds more hope than it does tragedy, when the two lane highway doesn’t seem as foreboding as can be in the darkest hours of the night. When it’s just us under the stars, the weight of black metal beneath us.

_‘B’_ is for the **blood** we’ve spilled along the way. For the bruises that have colored our skin, for the broken bones, for the blind pain of cracked ribs. It’s for the blueish echoes that knuckles have left against the jaw, for the angry knot of a busted lip. For the bandages, stitches, splints and casts that litter the miles behind us.

_‘C’_ is for the **crossroads** we’ve stood before. The ones that had us on our hands and knees, the ones that had our shaking breaths uttering despicable things. Monstrous things. Things that sound like, ‘I’d go to Hell for you.’

_‘D’_ is for those times that **death** cradled us too close. For when it tried to steal the breath right from our lungs and leave our bodies to rot. His kiss has touched us both, but he should know better by now--that no corpse box could ever seal our fates for good.

_‘E’_ is for the **exorcisms** we’ve rattled off the tip of our tongues, banishing the evil that dwells upon this earth. It is for the sigils that we’ve drawn to keep us safe, to keep us pure. It is for the tattoos that we bear on our chests, the ones that tell the crooked shadows of this world that they do not have permission to enter. That no evil could ever conquer the light of our souls.

_‘F’_ is for **family** , because it’s most important, what keeps us together. It’s for those we’ve lost and for those that are still with us. It is the thread that binds us, that keeps us from falling too far. It is everything we fight for, bruised and bloody, and through Heaven and Hell. Without it, we have nothing.

_‘G’_ is for the **ghosts** that have haunted us. For the spirits that have met the iron in our hands, for the bones we’ve salted and burned. It’s for the ones that are within us as well, the memories that lie under the skin like smoke and ash, still smoldering under the surface. It’s for the night she was taken from us, for when our apple pie life turned into an endless graveyard.

_‘H’_ is for the place we’ve always searched for: **Home**. A winter devil tore the foundation of our innocence out from under us, casting us into the world as nomads. We collect cities under our feet, like some collect dust on forgotten photographs on their walls. The world spins beneath us and we try to tell ourselves that we were not lost, that home is more than just four walls and a front door. That it could be a person, that it could be found inside of each other.

_‘I’_ is for the **Impala** that has carried us from crib to death, from grave to grave, to heaven and back again. She became the mother we lost, her embrace keeping us safe and sound. She’s put her life on the line for us more than once, taking the bullets, so that our chests never have to.

_‘J’_ is for **jerk**. Because, _bitch_.

_‘K’_ is for the place that aches within us like a hollow memory, **Kansas**. She chases us across state lines, the memory of our old house bleeding loudly across the miles. We try to avoid her as much as possible, because it hurts too much to think about that night and what we’ve lost. But sometimes we find ourselves driving by endless fields of yellow, and we can’t help but remember the smoke in our lungs and the smell of sweet perfume.

_‘L’_ is for that four letter word, **love**. We don’t say it, we don’t really have to, because it’s an unspoken truth between us. It is because of it that we’ve gone to such lengths to protect and save the other. There is nothing that can tear it from our fingers, not Hell--not Heaven. But oh how they’ve tried, how they still do. They think they can break this four letter word between us, but not even Lucifer himself could riddle himself out of its chains.

_‘M’_ is for **mom** , for Mary. For the memory of her last breath escaping her lungs as she burned on the ceiling. It is for the sweetness of her goodnight kiss on our foreheads, the one that we’ve both chased the warmth of, for our entire lives.

_‘N’_ is for **non timebo mala** , because it is not only engraved into the colt--it is engraved in our souls. There is no evil that we fear. As long as we are together, fighting side by side, there is nothing in this world or the next thousand galaxies that could be scarier than the sound of our names.

_‘O’_ is for **ouija board** , because the world should have known then what it was up against. It should have felt the divide tremble with the weight of our bond, should have known nothing could keep us apart--not even the failing of our own bodies.

_‘P’_ is for **pie** , because _pie_. We could argue over this for hours, fighting the cake vs pie debate we always find ourselves in. But pie will always win, at least for one of us.

_‘Q’_ is for the **questions** we ask ourselves in the middle of the night. The ones that follow us around like hanging nooses, the ones that tie themselves around the throat and beg for answers. And sometimes it is the lack of one that has us clinging to an almost empty bottle of whiskey, the burning amber somehow settling the indecision that boils within our lungs.

_‘R’_ is for the **rocksalt** that we load into shotgun shells, in the quiet of another motel room. It’s for the lines we lay by the door and every drafty window. It’s for the safety it represents, for the peace of mind that it gives us as we strip down and chase the backs of our eyelids.

_‘S’_ is for the place that came between us, **Stanford.** We don’t talk about it much, about the years we didn’t speak, about the night it all came to a nightmarish end. We don’t talk about the Stanford hoodie that still makes its way into the wash and we don’t talk about the crinkled picture in the back of one of our wallets. Sometimes we both wish things could’ve been different, wondering what would’ve happened if Dad hadn’t gone missing in the first place.

_‘T’_ is for the little **things**. Things like the holes that we wear themselves into the bottom of our socks, the monotony of eating burgers and fries for five days straight. Things like catching endless reruns of tv shows (x-files is so good?). Things like late night drives in the middle of nowhere, with nothing for miles but the soft pelt of rain on the windshield. Things like a day by the pool, or a day off to catch a movie. It’s for the things that are few in the land of plenty, the things we are not afforded--though we do try.

_‘U’_ is for our **undercover** alias’. For the ID’s we hide in the trunk of the impala, the ones that match secondhand suits that don’t always fit the best. For the personas we play, like parts in a movie, our skins melting like a chameleon’s. Because we live in a ‘whatever it takes to get the job done’ type of world.

_‘V’_ is for the **vows** that we’ve kept along the way. It started with a golden horned necklace, one that hung like an eternal reminder of what is most important: each other. Over the years, this vow (and so many others) have been tested again and again. We’ve faltered and we’ve left broken promises in the wake of our decisions. But in our hearts and in our souls, those vows are unanimously implicit. _‘There’s aint no me, if there aint no you.’_

_‘W’_ is for the **war** we were raised to fight. Hunters that grew up in the bootstraps of their father’s footsteps, growing up like soldiers in the middle of a nightmare. It’s for the guns tucked into the back of our pants, for the knives we hide in our jacket pockets. It’s for the suspicion that crawls up our spines, the one that tells us that something is off--that something just isn’t right.

_‘X’_ is for the **x amount** of people we’ve saved, the ones we think about when the morning sun is too bright and the ache in our bones sings too loudly. They are our purpose, the reason we trudge along--one foot in front of the other. Because we’re hunting things and saving people. You know, the family business.

_‘Y’_ is for the **years** that bleed out of our veins, with every cut and bruise. Our bodies paying the price for the heavy life we live. We’ve escaped death too many times, for our bodies to not feel it. Our souls being shoved back into half-rotten ribs, our shrivelled lungs begging for oxygen. We’re walking miracles to have lived this long, but our bodies are ancient--beyond the healing of angel grace.

_‘Z’_ is for the **zippo lighter** that used to be dad’s. Somehow it ended up in our pockets, almost like a family heirloom. We salted and burned our first grave with it and we also used it to burn the bodies of those we’ve loved and lost along the way. It’s almost a tradition, something sacred and unspoken. And one day, it’ll light up our own bones, taking us permanently to the other side where Heaven will finally be ours-- _forever_.


	42. No Resuscitation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Week Prompt #42:** Last Rites (suggested by Nina / [wincestismyclarity](http://wincestismyclarity.tumblr.com))
> 
> A/N: Major Character Death. 
> 
> I mean, I think with the prompt you can already kind of expect that, but in any case, just mentioning it officially!

Dean Winchester had given this day a great deal of thought over the course of his life, had speculated and dreamt about it, had hoped and even prayed a few times. And yet, in the end, nothing he’s ever imagined, dreamt, hoped and/or prayed about, could have ever prepared him for the reality he is greeted with.

Sam lies on the bed, his facial features sunken in and his skin pale. Long gone is the summer tan that kissed him, now he looks as white as a ghost--his body almost disappearing completely into the sea of sheets that surround him. If it wasn’t for his mop of brown hair and the small sheen of sweat along his forehead, he would be impossible to discern from his surroundings. It’s enough to jar Dean’s heart in his chest, enough to cause him to be panicky and unnerved, enough to send him back to those crossroads--if only Sam would let him.

But he had promised, had sworn with everything inside of him, that after that mess with the angel, he would never make that decision for Sam again. And here, now, when he wants to break that promise, wants to do everything in his power to divert the inevitable, he does nothing else but wrap his hand around Sam’s, giving it a gentle squeeze.

“Hey buddy,” Dean’s voice is quiet, just loud enough for Sam to hear. “I know I said I’d kick your ass if you didn’t pull through this, but that was before…” Dean’s voice trails off as he searches for the words. “Well, that was before,” Dean’s free hand waves over Sam, gesturing at his current state. “Before this started looking like it really might be... _it_.”

Dean’s thoughts take him to three days prior, takes him to the moment the bullets went through Sam’s chest. There were three of them in total and Dean could only get out two, as one was nestled right next to Sam’s heart and it was next to impossible to get it out without having him bleed out right then and there. So instead he stitched him up as best as he could, cleaned him up and prayed (yes prayed) to every divine spirit he could think of, urging them to let Sam pull through this. After all, he’s been through worse, been through things that no one should have ever lived to tell about, but that’s part of the miracle that is his Brother.

And for the first day and a half, Sam seemed to be pulling through, the color came back into his cheeks and he started to respond to Dean’s voice. Dean who, was thanking anything he could think of for this good news, because his heart just couldn’t handle that day--not yet, maybe not ever.

But he should’ve known then, what he knows now, that sometimes things get a little better, before they turn for the worse. For just as fast as Sam’s color came back, it drained back out. Dean’s almost positive he can see the color staining the sheets, but maybe that’s just him seeing things. Because Sam’s gonna be just fine, he’s gonna be just fine.

Yet, now he stands before his baby Brother, his pride and joy, his reasoning for every morning he’s opened his eyes and there’s something whispering in the back of his head that tells him he’s running out of time. And he squeezes Sam’s hand again and huffs out a bitter laugh, because of course, this is how it would all go down. Of course it wouldn’t be the other hundred nameless things that came before this, of course it would come down to a bullet that lodged itself a little too deep, cutting just enough.

Sam stirs, his voice deep with not being used and he chokes out something resembling, “Dean…”

Dean sits on the bed, never letting go of Sam’s hand and brings his free hand to card Sam’s wet bangs away from his forehead. “I’m here, Sammy--’mm here.”

Sam’s fingers squeeze around Dean’s, his head leaning into the touch of Dean’s fingers at his face. He tries mumbling out something else, but it jams in his throat and Dean is fast to shush him before he strains too hard.

“It’s okay, I know,” Dean reassures. “I know.”

Sam’s body relaxes then, his lungs heaving out a shaky breath, but his fingers remain strong around Dean’s.

“We don’t have much time, Sammy.” Dean whispers, because it hurts too much to say. “But I made you a promise and this time it’s in your hands.”

Dean trails his fingers down his Brother’s face and finds them curling around the covers and pulling them down just slightly, just enough to expose what he knew would be there. Years ago the place above Sam’s heart bore a mirror image of the tattoo on his own chest. But it was erased and Sam never got it redone, despite Dean’s worry and insistence. Instead, one night, Dean was left to find what Sam did replace it with and what his fingers trace over now. In a beautiful script, reads the words: No Resuscitation.

“If this is what you want,” Dean presses into the curve of the first ‘s’. “Then this is what I will give to you, even when every bone in my body…” Dean pauses, an emotion breaking loose from the deepest parts of his heart. “If this is what you want, Sammy, I will give it to you.”

Sam’s hand squeezes around Dean’s and Dean knows as good as anything, that Sam is as ready as he’s ever been. That Sam has dreamt of this moment himself, has accepted it, has greeted it with wide open arms, every inch of his body sighing with the sight of eternal rest, peace, and serenity in its grips. And how many times has Dean diverted this reality? How many times had he been the reason Sam had to keep up a fight that had beat him into the ground again and again? How many times had he kept Sam, just because he couldn’t let go?

Too many.

“I’ll be right back…” Dean untangles his fingers from Sam’s and goes to his duffle bag that sits in a chair by the door.

He digs through a sea of dirty clothes and miscellaneous things he keeps with him, he digs deeper and deeper until he finds an old matchbox in the pocket of a pair of jeans he hasn’t worn in years. He brings the matchbox closer into the light of the lamp that stands by the table, and with slow fingers, he pushes out the inside of it. In a normal scenario there would be a pile of unused matchsticks, but in this case, it’s exactly what he knew would be there. His forefinger and thumb reach in and curl around a black cord, until he’s pulling out an old familiar necklace--the gold face shining brightly in the light. It’s been years since he’s worn it, years since he drove back in the middle of the night and fished it out of the trash.

“I never told you about this,” Dean says, loud enough for Sam to hear him. “I always thought the right time would come, but it never did. And as the years passed, it seemed futile to even mention it. I meant what I said, when I said that I don’t need a symbol to remind me of how much I love you. Frankly, I never needed that, but this--this is different.”

Dean carries it back to where Sam lies and holds it in his hand as he looks down at his Brother, who is barely hanging on. “You gave it to me that Christmas and I never took it off. I didn’t get much growing up, but I did get one thing--I got you. And I know it’s fucked up to think this way, but I’m grateful for the life we’ve been given. I’m thankful I got to have you by my side through all of that, through everything really. And that’s what that means to me, it reminds me of where we’ve come from--reminds me that you’re the only one…” Dean pauses. “The only one who made the ride worth it in the first place.”

Dean’s fingers shake as he pulls the cord open and gently slides it over Sam’s head. He pulls it down around Sam’s neck and lays the golden horned amulet against his Brother’s chest. And when it’s there, he presses it firmly and lets Sam feel the weight of it against his skin, so he knows exactly what it is.

“I want you to know that it’s okay, I want you to know that you’ve done _enough_ \--given _**enough**_.” Dean’s voice chokes in the back of his throat, because this (out of everything he’s been through) is the hardest thing he will ever have to do in his life. “I want you to know that you are good, _so good_ , and **pure**. The blackest of evils in this world, could never dull the light of your soul--of your heart. And when you go,” Dean cries. “When you go, know that this world was far better for having you in it--that you leave this place a goddamned hero.”

Dean watches as tears well under Sam’s lashes, pooling before they finally fall down the sides of his cheeks. And he smiles through his own tears in that moment, because even in death’s grips--his Brother is beautiful.

“When you’re ready, Sammy…” Dean tries to remain strong, though the collar of his shirt is wet with fallen tears. “Take this with you,” Dean presses the amulet into Sam’s skin again. “And let it light your way, let it keep you safe--until... until we find each other again.”

Dean leans over and presses his lips to Sam’s forehead and then pulls back to press his thumb against the same place. “ _Bitch_.”

Sam lasts through the night, but gives his final breath into this world as the sun peeks her head up over the horizon. Dean feels the minute his chest gives out, his arms wrapped around his Brother, and watches as the curtain dances by the window, even though it’s closed. And after so long, he lets the ugly tears come, the big terrifying ones--the ones that feel like they rip through your body as they evacuate--leaving you wrecked and ruined.

It’s not until hours later, when the fire is warm against his skin, that he tangles his fingers around the black cord around his neck and finally feels a tiny shred of peace.

Because Sam’s okay, he’s okay. Dean looks up into the sky and watches as embers drift up into the night and he knows that Sam’s weary head has finally found rest.

Knows that he’s finally-- _free_.


End file.
